Snap #23 -Cherishing OUR Beautiful Forevers
If you need to be reminded just how good our lives really are, and, even if you don’t, read “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” by Pulitzer Prize writer and New Yorker author Katherine Boo.
“Behind the Beautiful Forevers” by Katherine Boo Photo by Patricia Wall, The New York Times
Katherine Boo Photo by atrandom.com
I cannot describe this blockbuster better than writer Jeff Giles, in a review for EW.com:
“Let’s skip the formalities,” he writes. “What’s it going to take for you to read a book about a Mumbai slum that sits on the edge of a lake of sewage? Keep in mind that it’s nonfiction, so nobody goes on a game show, nobody becomes a millionaire, nobody dances to ”Jai Ho.”
Would reading an unqualified rave be enough? If so, here you go: ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ is a riveting, fearlessly reported portrait of a poverty so obliterating that it amounts to a slow-motion genocide. Right now the book is sitting on my shelf making all the other books feel stupid.
Maybe you need the added inducement of knowing that Beautiful Forevers will be one of the year’s big books — a conversation starter, an award winner. It will be. Maybe you want to be promised that the book isn’t a screed, that it isn’t a guilt trip, and that no children you care about will die in pitiless circumstances. It isn’t, it isn’t…and I wish I could lie about that kid thing.”
Boo, who also was awarded a MacArthur Genius Award in 2003, lived for three-and-a-half years in Annawadi. Her book has already initiated intense conversation in India and will premiere next week to spectacular reviews in this country. One can only imagine the discussions this book might generate in your local book clubs.
Reading this book will not be a “snap” but having absorbed, savored and internalized this worthwhile work is one of the more important ones I have written – SNAP 23.
http://www.behindthebeautifulforevers.com/sample-page-2/
(In the Spirit of Full Disclosure: Katherine Boo’s brother, Tom, a doctor at the Rural Health Clinic in Bishop, California, and his wife are good friends of my daughter, Melissa, and her family. Prior to medical school, Tom was in the Peace Corp in Africa. He and his wife, Heleen, who is a nurse, left Bishop for several years to work with the World Health Organization, living in Nairobi, working on health issues in Sudan. Prior to their WHO assignment, he worked for the Toiyabe Indian Health Project in Bishop.)