Kurzbeschreibung

Beautifully written, rigorously researched, and intimately reported, Behind the Beautiful Forevers makes indelible the lives of individuals who are too often invisible, and whose courage is impossible to forget.

Beschreibung

In this brilliant, breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi's "most-everything girl," might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, based on years of uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds - and into the hearts of families impossible to forget.
Winner of the National Book Award The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award The Los Angeles Times Book Prize The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award The New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New York Times - The Washington Post - O: The Oprah Magazine - USA Today - New York - The Miami Herald - San Francisco Chronicle - Newsday
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New Yorker - People - Entertainment Weekly - The Wall Street Journal - The Boston Globe - The Economist - Financial Times - Newsweek /The Daily Beast - Foreign Policy - The Seattle Times - The Nation - St. Louis Post-Dispatch - The Denver Post - Minneapolis Star Tribune - Salon - The Plain Dealer - The Week - Kansas City Star - Slate - Time Out New York - Publishers Weekly

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"A book of extraordinary intelligence [and] humanity . . . beyond groundbreaking." - Junot Díaz, The New York Times Book Review
"Reported like Watergate, written like Great Expectations, and handily the best international nonfiction in years." - New York
"This book is both a tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece." - Judges' Citation for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
"[A] landmark book." - The Wall Street Journal

"A triumph of a book." - Amartya Sen
"There are books that change the way you feel and see; this is one of them." - Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
"[A] stunning piece of narrative nonfiction . . . [Katherine] Boo's prose is electric." - O: The Oprah Magazine
"Inspiring, and irresistible . . . Boo's extraordinary achievement is twofold. She shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care." - People
From the Hardcover edition.

Rezension

"A book of extraordinary intelligence [and] humanity . . . beyond groundbreaking." - Junot Díaz, The New York Times Book Review
"Reported like Watergate, written like Great Expectations, and handily the best international nonfiction in years." - New York
"This book is both a tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece." - Judges' Citation for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
"Incandescent writing and excruciatingly good storytelling." - The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Outstanding." - USA Today
"A richly detailed tapestry of tragedy and triumph told by a seemingly omniscient narrator with an attention to detail that reads like fiction while in possession of the urgent humanity of nonfiction." - Los Angeles Times
"Rends the heart, thrills the mind, pricks the conscience, and burns the pages." - Washingtonian
"[An] exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter. . . . Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"A jaw-dropping achievement, an instant classic of narrative nonfiction . . . With a cinematic intensity . . . Boo transcends and subverts every cliché, cynical or earnest, that we harbor about Indian destitution and gazes directly into the hearts, hopes, and human promise of vibrant people whom you'll not soon forget." - Elle
"Riveting, fearlessly reported . . . [ Behind the Beautiful Forevers ] plays out like a swift, richly plotted novel. That's partly because Boo writes so damn well. But it's also because over the course of three years in India she got extraordinary access to the lives and minds of the Annawadi slum, a settlement nestled jarringly close to a shiny international airport and a row of luxury hotels. Grade: A." - Entertainment Weekly
"A tough-minded, inspiring, and irresistible book . . . Boo's extraordinary achievement is twofold. She shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as importantly, she makes us care." - People (four stars)
"A shocking - and riveting - portrait of life in modern India . . . This is one stunning piece of narrative nonfiction. . . . Boo's prose is electric." - O: The Oprah Magazine
"[A] landmark book." - The Wall Street Journal
"Moving . . . a humane, powerful and insightful book . . . a book of nonfiction so stellar it puts most novels to shame." - The Boston Globe
"A mind-blowing read." - Redbook
"An unforgettable true story, meticulously researched with unblinking honesty . . . pure, astonishing reportage with as unbiased a lens as possible." - The Christian Science Monitor
"The most riveting Indian story since Slumdog Millionaire - except hers is true." - Marie Claire
"Seamless and intimate . . . a scrupulously true story . . . It's tempting to compare [ Behind the Beautiful Forevers ] to a novel, but . . . that would hardly do it justice." - Salon
"Extraordinary . . . moving . . . Like the best journeys, Boo's book cracks open our preconceptions and constructs an abiding bridge - at once daunting and inspiring - to a world we would never otherwise recognize as our own." - National Geographic Traveler
" Behind the Beautiful Forevers offers a rebuke to official reports and dry statistics on the global poor. . . . Boo is one of few chroniclers providing this picture. She's a moral force and . . . an artist of reverberating power." - The American Prospect
"Kate Boo's reporting is a form of kinship. Abdul and Manju and Kalu of Annawadi will not be forgotten. She leads us through their unknown world, her gift of language rising up like a delicate string of necessary lights. There are books that change the w

Klappentext

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE

"Inspiring . . . extraordinary . . . [Katherine Boo] shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care."-People

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • USA Today • New York • The Miami Herald • San Francisco Chronicle • Newsday

In this brilliant, breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport.

As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi's "most-everything girl," might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, based on years of uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds-and into the hearts of families impossible to forget.

WINNER OF: The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award • The Los Angeles Times Book Prize • The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award • The New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • People • Entertainment Weekly • The Wall Street Journal • The Boston Globe • The Economist • Financial Times • Newsweek / The Daily Beast • Foreign Policy • The Seattle Times • The Nation • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Denver Post • Minneapolis Star Tribune • Salon • The Plain Dealer • The Week • Kansas City Star • Slate • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly

Auszüge aus dem Buch

1.
Annawadi
LET IT KEEP, the moment when Officer Fish Lips met Abdul in the police station. Rewind, see Abdul running backward, away from the station and the airport, shirt buttons opening as he flies back toward his home. See the flames engulfing a disabled woman in a pink- flowered tunic shrink to nothing but a matchbook on the floor. See Fatima minutes earlier, dancing on crutches to a raucous love song, her delicate features unscathed. Keep rewinding, back seven more months, and stop at an ordinary day in January 2008. It was about as hopeful a season as there had ever been in the years since a bitty slum popped up in the biggest city of a country that holds one-third of the planet's poor. A country dizzy now with development and circulating money.
Dawn came gusty, as it often did in January, the month of treed kites and head colds. Because his family lacked the floor space for all of its members to lie down, Abdul was asleep on the gritty maidan, which for years had passed as his bed. His mother stepped carefully over one of his younger brothers, and then another, bending low to Abdul's ear. "Wake up, fool!" she said exuberantly. "You think your work is dreaming?"
Superstitious, Zehrunisa had noticed that some of the family's most profitable days occurred after she had showered abuses on her eldest son. January's income being pivotal to the family's latest plan of escape from Annawadi, she had decided to make the curses routine.
Abdul rose with minimal whining, since the only whining his mother tolerated was her own. Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. The pale sun lent the sewage lake a sparkling silver cast, and the parrots nesting at the far side of the lake could still be heard over the jets. Outside his neighbors' huts, some held together by duct tape and rope, damp rags were discreetly freshening bodies. Children in school-uniform neckties were hauling pots of water from the public taps. A languid line extended from an orange concrete block of public toilets. Even goats' eyes were heavy with sleep. It was the moment of the intimate and the familial, before the great pursuit of the small market niche got under way.
One by one, construction workers departed for a crowded intersection where site supervisors chose day laborers. Young girls began threading marigolds into garlands, to be hawked in Airport Road traffic. Older women sewed patches onto pink-and-blue cotton quilts for a company that paid by the piece. In a tiny, sweltering plastic- molding factory, bare-chested men cranked gears that would turn colored beads into ornaments to be hung from rearview mirrors-smiling ducks and pink cats with jewels around their necks that they couldn't imagine anyone, anywhere, buying. And Abdul crouched on the maidan, beginning to sort two weeks' worth of purchased trash, a stained shirt hitching up his knobby spine.
His general approach toward his neighbors was this: "The better I know you, the more I will dislike you, and the more you will dislike me. So let us keep to ourselves." But deep in his own work, as he would be this morning, he could imagine his fellow Annawadians laboring companionably alongside him.
ANNAWADI SAT TWO hundred yards off the Sahar Airport Road, a stretch where new India collided with old India and made new India late. Chauffeurs in SUVs honked furiously at the bicycle delivery boys peeling off from a slum chicken shop, each carrying a rack of three hundred eggs. Annawadi itself was nothing special, in the context of the slums of Mumbai. Every house was off-kilter, so less off-kilter looked like straight. Sewage and sickness looked like life.
The slum had been settled in 1991 by a band of laborers trucked in from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to repair a runway at the international airport. When the runway work was complete, they decided to stay near the airport and its tantalizing construction