Jillian's review
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
by Suketu Mehta
Jillian's review
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta
Jillian's review
rating:
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I read this book when I was heading to India, and it did the trick of getting me excited about the tumultuous city where I'd be living. It's a little hard to get into, as I have difficulty getting interested in histories of politics, but Mehta has a pretty compelling storytelling technique where he lets you kind of be there while he's doing research, which I think is more effective in this book than just reading the results. Some of the sections were more interesting (to me) than others, and at times you wondered how this guy gained such access to these super underground cultures in India as an NRI. When I went to India, a guy I met said that Mehta had stolen some of his stories from other people who had actually experienced them- specifically when he speaks as a writer working with Bollywood producers on a film about gangsters. My friend in India claims that this happened to another director, so I kind of began to see Mehta's credibility waivering, calling into question some other...more
