Sunday, April 9, 2017

BOOK: Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (8 h 16 min)

This never felt like a nonfiction book and was very fascinating. In the endnotes, the author explained how she got the information and why she wrote it as she did, after moving to India with her husband. She was a journalist, and spent months and months with the people who lived in this horrific slum but managed to eke out a life. The story is written in third-person following a large number of residents of the slum near Mumbai airport. 

There is drama, and people trying to survive when it doesn't take much to be pushed back to the very bottom. The poverty and corruption of India can be stunning and this book looks at what it is like to be living at the very bottom. Very Slumdog Millionaire.