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Item Details
| Title:
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BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS
LIFE AND DEATH IN A MUMBAI SLUM |
| By: |
Katherine Boo |
| Format: |
Electronic book text |
| List price:
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£14.99 |
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We currently do not stock this item, please contact the publisher directly for
further information.
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| ISBN 10: |
1846274508 |
| ISBN 13: |
9781846274503 |
| Publisher: |
GRANTA BOOKS |
| Pub. date: |
9 February, 2012 |
| Pages: |
288 |
| Description: |
A landmark book about how poverty works, about who fuels the machinery of India's growth, and how a complex human society can grow out of nothing anywhere, even on a Mumbai rubbish dump. |
| Synopsis: |
This is a portrait of Annawadi, a notorious slum built on garbage dumps at the edge of Mumbai Airport encircled by five shining new multistorey hotels. It is a place where the pioneering scavengers, Tamil construction workers, have been supplemented by other economic migrants, many rural north Indians. All of them live in shacks overrun with rats and lice, close to open sewers, and forage on the waste of the 'overcity', rich, booming Mumbai. Illegal businesses built of racketeering, recycling and loansharking keep the slum ticking over; and grubby local politicians feed off them all. The book starts in the aftermath of a horrifying murder, and then spools back in time to trace its context and causes, giving each chapter in turn to a different resident of the slum, each keenly drawn. Consecutively they comprise an extraordinarily vivid and vigorous depiction of the life teeming in this most unpromising of places, and of the complications, ambitions and corruptions of the new India. It feels, at times, positively Dickensian. It has no right to be as entertaining as it is, given the subject matter, but it is.After three years of hard reporting, Boo gives us the most insightful account of what it takes to survive in slum poverty, and, more importantly, what it takes to lift oneself out of that trap and enter the economic mainstream. While Boo is meticulous in documenting the corruption and violence that eviscerate the hopes of young people in one of the world's most unequal cities, her ultimate goal is to illuminate the improvisational genius of those who live on society's far margins. Here are the untold, sometimes heroic stories of people you've never before thought of and now won't be able to forget. |
| Publication: |
UK |
| Imprint: |
Portobello Books Ltd |
| Returns: |
Returnable |
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