From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Katherine Boo

Start date: July 15, 2013

Finish date: August 15, 2013

Discussion: Reading List

Discussion leader: Barbara

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Reading List

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What Members Thought

Aug 23, 2013 Jane rated it really liked it

I was hesitant to read at first. Didn't think that Boo had found a believable voice for the people who inhabit this garbage city on the edge of Mumbai. Rave reviews from fellow Goodreads readers convinced me to try again. I'm glad I did. It's an amazing window into a world that is so distant from suburban Philadelphia. I got over the fact that Boo often chooses literary language to convey the characters' thoughts. Before long I was swept up in the lives of these characters. I'm so glad I read it ...more

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Aug 11, 2013 Mary Ellen rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction

This book brought me into a wholly different world - a slum built precariously along an airport access road in Mumbai, India - and into the lives of a small circle of its inhabitants. I was almost afraid to start reading it, because I feared it would be unrelievedly grim. While certainly no jaunt through a rose garden, it nonetheless was not a heavy experience, because of the presentation of the complex humanity of a number of the people on whom it focuses. (I keep wanting to say "characters," b ...more

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Sep 23, 2014 Laurel Bradshaw rated it liked it

Shelves: audiobook, daytimers-book-club, non-fiction, 21st-century, india

This isn't the kind of book that one can say one "likes." It is certainly powerful, moving, and thought-provoking. It is written in a style that perhaps removes one from the horrors that are recounted - straight-forward and unemotional. All of the events are real, but it reads like fiction. It may be about poverty, and corruption, desperation and death, but it is also about the fierce competitiveness of survival, hope for a better future, and the occasional triumph of education and information o ...more

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