Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Written by Katherine Boo
Narrated by Sunil Malhotra
4/5
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About this audiobook
Winner of the National Book Award | The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award | The Los Angeles Times Book Prize | The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award | The New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New York Times • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • USA Today • New York • The Miami Herald • San Francisco Chronicle • Newsday
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New Yorker • People • Entertainment Weekly • The Wall Street Journal • The Boston Globe • The Economist • Financial Times • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • Foreign Policy • The Seattle Times • The Nation • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Denver Post • Minneapolis Star Tribune • Salon • The Plain Dealer • The Week • Kansas City Star • Slate • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"A book of extraordinary intelligence [and] humanity . . . beyond groundbreaking."-Junot Díaz, The New York Times Book Review
"Reported like Watergate, written like Great Expectations, and handily the best international nonfiction in years."-New York
"This book is both a tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece."-Judges' Citation for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
"[A] landmark book."-The Wall Street Journal
"A triumph of a book."-Amartya Sen
"There are books that change the way you feel and see; this is one of them."-Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
"[A] stunning piece of narrative nonfiction . . . [Katherine] Boo's prose is electric."-O: The Oprah Magazine
"Inspiring, and irresistible . . . Boo's extraordinary achievement is twofold. She shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care."-People
Editor's Note
Compassion & hope…
Imbedded reporting at its finest: Boo documents the impoverished lives of those in Annawadi’s slums thoroughly and with the utmost compassion. Beautifully captures the unfailing power of hope.
Katherine Boo
Katherine Boo, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has spent the last 20 years reporting from within poor communities, considering how societies distribute opportunity and how individuals get out of poverty. She learned to report at The Washington City Paper. She was also an editor of the Washington Monthly and, for nearly a decade, a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, her first book, received the United States' National Book Award. Her magazine and newspaper work has been recognised with a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
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Reviews for Behind the Beautiful Forevers
1,313 ratings193 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The author doesn’t appear anywhere in the book; Behind the Beautiful Forevers is an attempt to immerse readers in the lives of an impoverished fringe population, one of many whose residents are missing out on India’s economic rise. I thought the author did this very well, but with Behind the Beautiful Forevers, my method of coming to a book without knowing much about it in advance backfired on me. I kept wondering distractedly how the author could possibly know what this or that person was thinking or the detailed conversations that were relayed. An author’s note at the end explains how she knew what everyone thought and felt and said from hundreds of interviews and recorded video statements that she had interpreted and translated; this information would have been better had it come at the beginning.There are no points of view other than those of the residents of Annawadi in the book. The author is presenting a snapshot of a single, small segment of society; she doesn’t attempt to balance the facts as Annawadians see them with statements or objections from others who live outside of the "undercity". The appalling, chronic corruption in Mumbai daily life detailed in Behind the Beautiful Forevers seemed incredible to me, but is apparently inextricably woven into the fabric of society there. The graft and injustice at this level of society as described in this book is sickening, and the problems of Annawadi residents seemed insurmountable.For fuller review, please visit
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Over 1 billion people live on less than a dollar a day. Here we have an intimate portrait of a dozen or so mostly children and mothers in a Mumbai slum living on about 33 cents. Of course we've seen it before, in other books and movies, but the verisimilitude and depth of the reporting takes it to a new level. The combination of factual reporting and novelistic technique is as if being there in person. It's one of the more difficult and challenging books I have read. It will stay with me for a long time and has changed my perspective on India and the world's poor in the context of globalization.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Relentless. The narrative reads as fiction, at a breathtaking pace, every observation drilling in the dead ends, often literally, met in a Mumbai slum. The slum is surrounded by plush hotels and an airport signifying the globalisation of this bustling city, yet none of this filters down to the "down to earn-and-eat" poor. Divisions between the slum-dwellers, real and imagined, for all purposes dwarf the overarching division between rich and poor. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is about how they survive day-to-day. How their lives become insignificant, to themselves as well as others, not because of any religious or brutish factors but because of their dire circumstances and worldly corruption which keeps them there.Think Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, twice the pace, yet unbelievably true. The Author's Note at the end is a must-read. I have had the pleasure of reading her close friend Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi, Gandhi Before India); and also her husband Sunil Khilnani, whose Incarnations: India in 50 Lives I recommend for an overview of key historical figures and breadth of Indian culture.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" is a close look at the struggle that is the daily life of so many of India's poor. The author, who is married to an Indian man, spent time on the ground with the people she profiles in her study, and it shows in the way that she was able to make each of them stand out as the unique human being they are. But (and I don't know that this is what Boo is aiming for) if the author wants her readers to come away from "Beautiful Forevers" with hope that life will eventually get better for India's poor, that did not happen for me. Rather, I find the book to be the most depressing one that I've read in years because I do not see much hope for a better life for any of the people profiled - or for any of their slum neighbors. The way that these poor treat each other is appalling, but in a dog-eat-dog world like the one they live in, it is understandable. They keep others down by lying about each other, filing false charges/claims with the police or with lawyers, stealing from each other, and abusing each other in every way imaginable. "Beautiful Flowers" is a multi-award winner, including the National Book Award and The Pen Award, and I can understand why it did so well. But what the book revealed about human nature, left me feeling sadder and more hopeless about the future than I can recall ever having been. Maybe it's time my eyes were opened.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The 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 will be right in the end. Beautiful forever. I don’t think I’m giving anything away if I say up front that, no, it really doesn't. This is real life, such as it is. “Beautiful forevers” refers to the ads for floor tiles that are plastered to the wall which runs along the Airport Road that separates Mumbai’s Annawadi slum from the city itself. On one side, there's an international airport, tourists, and huge luxury hotels; on the other, abject poverty, stunning cruelty, and rampant corruption. I expected the poverty. The senseless cruelty and corruption at every turn really overwhelmed me. Katherine Boo, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, lived among the people of Annawadi for almost four years. There is a lot of depth to this story, which loosely follows several families and young children through the economic upheaval and terrorist attacks of 2008, and the court trial of members of a local family. And, although not necessarily a beautiful forever, Boo somehow managed to end the book on a somewhat hopeful note. This is a stunning, beautifully written piece of narrative non-fiction that is often difficult and painful to read. It almost read like fiction but had it been, it would have seemed too unbelievable. It is not the type of book I am typically drawn to, but after reading just the first few pages, I found that I couldn’t put it down. I also found that I couldn’t read anything else
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Succeeds in telling a powerfully specific narrative of a particular Mumbai slum and highlighting the general corruption, ingenuity, and morality arising in the face of rapid globalization.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Well that was a depressing book. This tells the story of a handful of people living in a modern day slum in Mumbai, India. There is nothing positive in the lives of these people, and while that is certainly not the author's fault, it made for some difficult reading. It is very sad to think that there are still places in the world where this level of poverty exists. It makes me think hard about the complaints I have in my life.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm in awe of this book! Some parts made me super sad, while others made me laugh out loud. Powerful book. Boo brought India and the slums of Mumbai to life.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fictionalized account of life in an ignored undercity in a hidden corner of the glitzy Mumbai international airport. Am always torn when reading such accounts as I feel very much like a voyeur. There are exits from their miserable lives but people get out only partially thru talent or hard work, and just as often thru pure serendipity. Definitely enthralling when it comes to the details of the life of the urban poor in India but I was more moved by the starker language of Sanora Babb's novel paralleling the times of "Grapes of Wrath."
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Both dark and enlightening at once. While the subject matter may offend some sensibilities, it reminds others that we have much to be grateful for.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I recommend that one begins reading this book with the "Author's Note." Katherine Boo is a great writer who had the perseverance to undertake a daunting task- writing about life in a Mumbai slum situated on the edge of an airport and high-end hotels. "Life" in the slum is appalling. I found it hard to finish the book because life in the slum is so wretched. Required reading for anyone concerned about income inequality and man's inhumanity to man....
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is one of the best books I've read in awhile. I fell in love with it before I realized it was non-fiction and enjoyed it that much more from there on out! It was so great to see the normalcy amidst the chaos of life in the slum and the feeling that you were right there in the midst of it. I've visited similar places in other countries and I felt like I could smell the smells and hear the noises of that place. The writing style with lots of action keep me intrigued and turning the pages. Hats off to Katherine for all of the research that went into this amazing book! Definitely recommend!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I felt the author's writing style was excellent. Reading this book, I didn't actually know until the end that it was non-fiction. This made the stories even more impactful. The character development, the situations described and the conditions in which these people live is heart-breaking. The descriptions of the caste system and the corruption within their small community and the country overall is so very disturbing. An incredible book that tells the real-life horrors of living in an Indian slum.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I almost didn't read this book because I interpreted the description 'narrative non-fiction' to mean 'historical fiction' -- a fictionalized account of a historical period or incident. This was a totally wrong assumption and had I not stumbled upon the Author's Note at the BACK of the book (I think it should have been the Forward) that explained that everything--every person, every incident, every fact-- in the book was true and researched, recorded and filmed over many years, I would have re-shelved this excellent account of life in Mumbai's slums because from the first sentence, it read like red-hot page-turning fiction: "Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father."
Katherine Boo was a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post, which should have tipped me off. Her writing won her a Pulitzer Price, a MacArthur 'Genius' grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.
Many of us will have passed by the Mumbai slum by the international airport dozens of times, or heard stories and read newspaper articles of the corruption of the Mumbai police and judicial system, or may even know first-hand how functionless India is unless one knows how to operate in its web of corruption and pay-offs, but this true account of a handful of protagonists, their lives, dreams, successes, failures and deaths, captures all these strands into one. How the terrorist attack enacted at the Taj and Oberoi affected India's tourism industry that left children starving in its slums, to how well-meaning non-profit organisations feed the greed of those who know how to work the system...this is a book that has rightly been called 'the best book yet written on contemporary India'. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Impressive research into one specific slum community. Interesting to get a glimpse of a life so foreign from my own experiences; yet intriguing to put pieces together to see the similarities of people and their reactions to hardship.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting and thorough recounting of life in a Mumbai slum. Perhaps too many characters--difficult to keep the threads of all the different stories and names. Nevertheless, the book creates a vivid picture of the ingenuity of India's poorest citizens and their ceaseless adaptations and inventions in their attempts to survive, and hopes for prosperity. I am also reading Rudyard Kipling's Kim, so the contrast between the Englishman's recollection of growing up in Britain's India and the reality of today is particularly striking to me.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I picked up this book because it was on Bill Gates's list of books that he read. I figured if one of the leading business and philanthropic leaders is reading it I should too. Others have reviewed the content which I found interesting, so I'll give you my impressions. I found the text compelling and it painted a picture of Mumbai. But I couldn't find the story line, plot, or arc to the narrative. Overall it was interesting and hard to get through.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shocking look at the vast corruption in the country of India. Interestingly, the author never related the poverty issue to the historically cultural condition of the caste system deeply rooted in the Indian tradition. At the same time, after reading this book, I am thinking how corrupt our system may be as it relates to addressing the problem of poverty in America...even worldwide.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Since her character-driven stories for the Washington Post about group homes for intellectually disabled people, I've been in awe of Katherine Boo's journalistic commitment and her ability to weave a compelling story from her subjects' daily lives. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is well worth the time. After reading this, I felt as though I had journeyed to Mumbai and had moved in to the slums for a visit that was long enough to impart understanding. What a gift Boo has given the world beyond the poor neighborhoods of Mumbai.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I was struck by the rawness of life in this slum "built in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport." Here are some passages to set the tone."Everything around is roses" is how Abdul's younger brother, Mirchi, put it. "And we are the shit in between.""True, only six of the slums three thousand residents had permanent jobs. (The rest, like 85 percent of Indian workers, were part of the informal, unorganized economy.) True, a few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake's edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slumdwellers who didn't fry rats and eat weeds, like Abdul, a felt sense of their upward mobility."And then, not for the faint-of-heart:"Abdul had seen a boy's hand cut clean off when he was putting plastic into one of the shredders. The boy's eyes had filled with tears, but he hadn't screamed. Instead he'd stood there with his blood-spurting stump, his ability to earn a living ended, and started apologizing to the owner of the plant. "Saab, I'm sorry," he'd said to the man in white. 'I won't cause you any problems by reporting this. You will have no trouble from me.'"For all Mirchi's talk of progress, India still made a person know his place..."This is a life I can scarce imagine and one I know I would not do well in if it was my reality. The writing is gorgeous, the characters are vivid, and the story is compelling. But life is hard here! Poverty is everywhere, corruption abounds, love is scarce. "...he had tried to be honorable in his final years as a boy, but wouldn't be able to sustain it now that he was pretty sure he was a man. A man, if sensible, didn't make bright distinctions between good and bad, truth and falsehood, justice and that other thing."For some time I tried to keep the ice inside me from melting," was how he put it. "But now I'm just becoming dirty water, like everyone else. I tell Allah I love Him immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is."This is a neighborhood and a life I am only too happy to be apart from. People truly live like this. At times, I did not want to read this book, but I knew I had to be open to these images and people, their lives; to see it and be moved by it. 4 stars
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Annawadi is a Mumbai slum of about 3,000, nestled near the Sahar International Airport and a sewage lake. Pulitzer Prize winner Boo spent three years observing and asking questions of Annawadi's most prominent members. Abdul, a young and eternally hopeful trash picker; Asha, determined to be the undercity's political leader; Fatima the One-Leg, whose reputation as a prostitute doesn't deter her from shouting her opinions at neighbors. Boo seamlessly narrates the daily lives of these struggling people while outlining India's political corruption and social and religious divides. It is important that she maintain small moments of her journalist background - this continues to remind the reader that the stories are real. There is an author's note at the end of the book that reiterates Boo's intense research. It may be worth having this at the beginning, getting the reader to know up front that, regardless of the storyteller narrative, this is nonfiction. This is an eye-opening observation of India's poorest. I have the advanced readers edition, but I'm betting later publishings will have "national bestseller" on the cover.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was an excellent book. Boo has written an enlightening expose of the poverty and corruption in modern India using a tiny sliver of connected/related people living in a slum of Mumbai. It took me awhile to understand the flow of the book, but it did all come together to portray disturbing realities.I recommend reading the author blurb at the back of the book before reading the body of the story. It sets the reasons, hopes, and expectations of writing this particular account. It helped me understand where this was going. Like the author, I don't just want to hear how horrible slum life is. I want to explore what hope and opportunities are available to lift up the undercities and promising individuals within. Boo tried to address this. Obviously, there is no magic cure."... maybe because of the boiling April sun, he thought about water and ice. Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too. He, himself, was probably little different, constitutionally, from the cynical, corrupt people around him... If he had to sort all humanity by its material essence, he thought he would probably end up with a single gigantic pile. But here was the interesting thing. Ice was distinct from -and in his view, better than - what it was made of.He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai's dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals. For self interested reasons, one of the ideals he most wanted to have was a belief in the possiblity of justice...He wanted to be recognized as better than the dirty water in which he lived. He wanted a verdict of ice."Recommended reading.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5muy buen libro nos habla de la creatividad del ser humano
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A poignant and honest account of the disenfranchised residences of Mumbai's slums. At times the universal truths highlighted within this novel leads one to feel the sheer volume of the world's injustice, too immense to change. However, I believe the understanding of a stranger's journey is in itself progress.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was a very eye opening book that kept me on my toes and made my jaw hit the floor more than once.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is certainly a hard read, and the promise of hope in the subtitle remains rather empty. Extreme, chronic poverty renders compassion useless, so much so that many just don't care. This is a good one to pair with Age of Vice, which I read last month. That one is fiction, while this one is nonfiction, but I think they add to each other well.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Katherin Boo’s nonfiction story of the poverty and hopelessness of the lower class in India, specifically in Mumbai, is a condemnation on not only Indians but of the “haves” all over the world. Boo spent nearly four years with one community of squatters on the edges of the state of the art airport in Mumbai and embedded with the people to get to know them and their problems. It took some time for a caucasian Anglo to be accepted, but apparently after a time she was. I listened to the audio version of “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” narrated excellently by Sunil Malhotra. I had to remind myself often at the beginning that this was not a novel. The abject poverty and hopelessness of the people living in the squalor of the airport fringe contrasted so dramatically with the affluence that was sweeping India at the time. Probably the most lucrative profession among the population of the squatters camp was sifting through garbage to get hold of recyclable metal and plastic. The merchants of trash treat the job as almost a profession, although the profits are slim, indeed. Malhotra’s narration is first class with changing Indian accents indicating what type of character was speaking. Male and female voices were equally well narrated. He is one of the best book narrators I’ve heard, and I’ve heard many.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is powerful. Well written very much like a novel but all the more stirring because the characters are real people. It is sad and depressing and real. The lives of these slumdwellers is so harsh. Corruption is rampant and Annawadi runs on bribes. I quote from the author " It is easy from a safe distance to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good."
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Life in an Annawadi slum is tragic, sad, sometimes humorous. Follow the Husain family as they struggle through life by any means possible and their neighbors who survive sometimes through unsavory means. An absolute must read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A description of life in a Mumbai slum.