Book Review on: Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, By Katherine Boo

I just finished reading Katherine Boo's book called, "Beyond the Beautiful Forevers," a fascinating, yet extremely upsetting, account of the slum-dwellers who live in the Annawadi Slum next to the international airport in Mumbai. I bought the book after listening to an interview with Boo on NPR, that I heard a few months ago. In the interview, she speaks about some of the things that I am most curious about as an anthropologist - how did you bare living in such conditions? Did you lend anyone money? How do you live with yourself now after seeing that people live in such conditions of extreme poverty? Listen to the NPR interview here.

And Boo spears us no details in her description of what it is like in Annawadi - cooking rats where there is no other food, suicide, mostly among women, unrealized dreams to leave the slum, disease and death from very preventable causes.

Perhaps the most upsetting, yet eye opening part of the book was how close the slum was to the international airport. How such extreme poverty can live aside such wealth - a place that Americans and wealthy Indians pass through everyday.

Doing my work mostly in Peru and Bolivia, I have never seen such urban poverty. And honestly, I don't know if I could stomach such extreme circumstances, let along three years, which is what Boo did.

These are some quote from the book, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, that I loved:

"In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this under city strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained un-breached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace" (236).

"In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is demolished. The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly" (244).