Behind the Beautiful Forevers

i read this senior year of high school and i remember being very bored but interested in the individuals lives

A really strong book. A strongly humane portrait of some of the lives crushed by India's rough economic growth. A good complement to Mehta's Maximum City.

“Behind The Beautiful Forevers” is a hard read that I definitely won't want to revisit. That being said, I have no doubt that this book will stay in my mind. Through the lives of several slumdwellers in Annawadi, India, Katherine Boo explores themes of corruption vs hope and questions what the capability is for those in positions of poverty to escape. 

This is a really cool book. It is a true story, meticulously researched, and then written like a novel. While occasionally there are preachy under/overtones, they were not overly distracting. Definitely worth reading!

Heartbreaking read honestly. I have only glimpsed these worlds in India from afar, but Boo makes them come alive in all their terror and hope and injustice. I'm glad I read this book because I often wondered what it was like to live in some slums in Mumbai. I have relatives who know people who survive on peanuts and I thought that that was terrible. But the wondering never turned into anything. I never learned more. I never felt any desire to help besides in the general way. The police brutality, racism, corruption, lack of job opportunity – I mean those are just problems perpetrated by the institutions that are supposed to help the people of Annawadi. There's a lot to be done and I think about this book often when I think about how I might help the world.

Not an easy read especially if you've never been to Bombay. Even for those who've lived there, Annawadi is that familiar place that you refused to know more about. Boo weaves a compelling story from real-life narratives of the people she met.

So straight off I was pretty confused with this whole narrative non-fiction business. I get that it is a way to enliven what would still be a fantastic traditionally presented non-fiction book, but it concerned me the whole way through that I was unable to tell exactly what was true, and what liberties the author had taken, or where it might have been embellished. There is a lot of the character's (subject's??) thoughts explained during the story - I was puzzled / troubled by how she obtained such personal information.

Yes, there is a fairly thorough explanation in the author's note at the end of the book - and it seems legit - seemingly she pestered the characters with continuous and repetitive interviews and triple checked everything with any corroborative stories etc. But - really, why put this at the end of the book and not the beginning. Explain this to us before we get sceptical and annoyed and put off. I purposely avoid reviews of a book I am reading or about to read... I look at them when I consider purchase, but not just prior to reading or during reading, or I might have picked up the fact I should have skipped to the authors note first!

I have decided not to delve into plot description, there is too much, but what I will say, is if this was fiction - it would have been very good fiction. As non fiction, it is many things - it is both uplifting and depressing, the ability of the slum-dwellers of Annawadi to pick themselves up and keep going is amazing, the level of corruption is appalling, and would be incredibly hard to cope with for most of us. The systematic bribery, misappropriation of money and supplies, the corruption runs so deep it is endemic - the police, the courts, the lawyers, the doctors and hospitals, social workers, politicians, the airport security guards, everyone in a position where they can put pressure on others. Inequality and injustice and very hard to accept on a scale as large as India.

Depressingly the poor are often their own worst enemies - those further up the ‘foodchain' take advantage of the poor, the poor, who have limited capacity to wield any power over anyone, still take any opportunity to try and take advantage of their equally poor neighbours. Everyone looks for an opportunity to benefit from every event or situation. Rather than band together and challenge those above them, they bitterly battle each other, ensuring it is incredibly difficult for anyone to rise.

Four stars - would have been five, but the narrative non-fiction approach still has me doubting.

Nothing evokes guilt like reading about poverty on a brand-new shiny e-book gadget...

It's easy to forget this isn't a work of fiction and instead represents over 3 years the author spent in a Mumbai slum interviewing its residents. Unlike a typical journalistic novel, Boo disappears from the narrative and lets the people speak for themselves.

The slum dwellers live in the space nearby the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, walled off from it's clean terminals and opulent hotels by a large billboard for floor tiles that over and over promise to stay Beautiful Forever. They scavenge and live off the detritus travellers leave behind. When a spiteful, one-legged prostitute sets herself on fire and falsely accuses her neighbours, it sets in motion a series of events. Beyond notions of guilt or innocence, everyone sees it as an opportunity to line their pockets from the police to the neighbours. Despite their bottom rung status there is still jockeying for position and notions of hierarchy.

I really did want to like this book ... And true to the rating, I found it OK. I didn't like it nor did I dislike it. I can appreciate the depth of her reporting and her skill in crafting a narrative that seemed more like a novel, replete with an interesting cast of characters, the treatment of whom Boo resists making heroes or villains out of. But in the end, it never grabbed me.

I kept having to remind myself that this was NOT fiction. The writing was wonderful and the story compelling. I was inspired, angered, amazed and disgusted all at the same time. I wanted more.

I listened to this, and perhaps that was the wrong way to read this book. It had a lot of good information about slum life and culture, but I just didn't get into the story - I found all the different characters and subplots confusing.

Devastating and brilliant. At times, it felt like Yet Another Slum Story, and I was flashbacking to the 1980s films of Shyam Benegal (“Chakra” and “Mandi” sprang immediately to mind). But that never diminishes its impact, which - if your morality is still intact - is huge. If your morality is NOT intact, then this is one of those books that will shame you back into trying to Do Good. I work in a Good profession (I like to think so), but this book made me consider quitting everything and going to run an NGO in Annawadi itself. Of course, if I learned anything, it was also that corruption is endemic. Yet even with the pervasive cynicism, I finished this book feeling enriched and - well, not hopeful, but not completely hopeless either. Written with empathy and a great eye for detail, even with a bit of humor. Yes, it also reads like a novel.

This is the India you don't hear about any more, the India that the technological revolution has left behind, the India that we once heard about every day on American media, the India of the untouchables, the India of the trash sorters, the India of the maimed, the India of those who live in shelters thrown together with reclaimed bricks and aluminum and foil and who spend their days trying to get together enough coins to purchase a meager meal cooked over an open fire.

Boo lived for three years with people living precarious existences in squalid poverty just next to the luxurious hotels by the Mumbai airport. The book is written with the beauty of a novel, but also with the terrible truth that everything in the story is nonfiction.