Behind the Beautiful Forevers : Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Hardcover)

from Crazymamie

This is a beautifully written work of narrative nonfiction that reads like a novel. Katherine Boo spent three years researching this book in Annawadi, a slum located behind the international airport in Mumbai, India. The author's notes at the end of the book describe just how meticulous her resea...

from thewanderingjew

There are moments of innocence, and a bit of unexpected wit amidst the descriptions of horrific suffering, abject misery and violence that are juxtaposed against each other and accepted as a normal way of life by the residents of Annawandi, an unbelievably impoverished community of the poor in In...

from coppers

The cover of Behind the Beautiful Forevers shows a child crouched on the ground, face tilted beseechingly to the sky. That, combined with the title, referring to something being forever beautiful, might lead a reader to believe that life, however bleak, will work out in this story, and everything...

from Opinionated

A hugely readable slice of reportage about 4 years in the Annawadi slum just outside Mumbai airport. Katherine Boo is careful not to patronise her subjects, or to pity them; most of her characters are resourceful, hard working and entirely lacking in self pity. Mostly they expect no help and no j...

from jnwelch

"Seventeen years later, almost no one in this slum was considered poor by official Indian benchmarks. Rather, the Annawadians were among roughly one hundred million Indians freed from poverty since 1991, when, around the same moment as the small slum's founding, the central government embraced ec...