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

永恒美丽的背后：孟买地下城的生命、死亡与希望

入选《纽约时报》2012年度十大好书

本书作者凯瑟琳·布是普利策奖获奖记者，花费三年时间追踪访查孟买底层的人群，通过录音、录像、访谈记录了2007年至2011年间这些居民的生活状况。布女士用精巧的文笔向读者展示了豪华酒店附近一个被忽略的世界，这里饱受贫穷和腐败困扰，希望与绝望交替浮现。本书直指传统纪实文学不愿碰触的领域，勾勒出弱势群体扣人心弦的奋斗历程，具有独特的深度。本书曾获得2012年美国国家图书奖非虚构类奖项，并入选亚马逊网站、《华盛顿邮报》（The Washington Post）以及《噢，奥普拉杂志》（O, The Oprah Magazine）的2012年十大好书榜单。

Author：Katherine Boo

Paperback: 288 pages

Publisher: Portobello Books Ltd (7 Feb. 2013)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1846274516

ISBN-13: 9781846274510

Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 1.8 x 19.8 cm

Book Description

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

Review

"[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 cliche, 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....["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) 

"Extraordinary."

--"The New York Times Book Review" 

"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 

"Gripping...A brilliant novelistic narration." 

-"Wall Street Journal " 

"Moving.... a humane, powerful and insightful book....A book of nonfiction so stellar it puts most novels to shame." 

--"Boston Globe" 

"A mind-blowing re

Boo blends the clear-eyed candour of a journalist with a novelist's sense of drama in a modern morality tale. --'Non-fiction summer reads', Guardian

'Presented as a story, but it turns out to be all true, as told to reporter Katherine Boo. It is a shocking description of the lives of residents of Annawadi, Mumbai, a slum by a sewage lake near the airport.' --'Readers best books of 2013', Guardian

'Deserved every ounce of praise heaped upon.' --'Readers best books of 2013', Guardian

“Must read. Katherine Boo “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”. A Mumbai slum understood and imagined as never before in language of intense beauty.” (Salman Rushdie)

“The even-handedness that stems from Katherine Boo’s natural and abundant empathy is one of the many appeals of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, her gorgeous book on one of Mumbai’s slums, Annawadi…The book contains a particularly important message for those who have monopolised the ear of the Indian government’s key leaders, and who place their hopes for the poor in financial handouts and empowerment through legal rights.” (Business Standard)

“The words of Boo and the inhabitants of Annawadi rushed through me like a river, cracking open thoughts of how hard this work is, my anger at those who demand simple solutions and expect easy returns; yet, at the sametime, pushing me more urgently to find voice, to speak truth when it hurts. For all of this, I am grateful to the author for her courage, persistence, and openness.” (The Huffington Post)

“Riveting…[A] stunning piece of narrative nonfiction; it not only reports on some of the world’s poorest people and their dizzying resourcefulness and criminality but portrays them in all their humanity.” (O, The Oprah Magazine)

“[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.” (The New York Times)

“The book plays out like a swift, richly plotted novel….Boo gives even the broadest themes (the collateral damage of globalization, say) a human face. And there are half a dozen characters here so indelible ― so swept up in impossible dreams and schemes ― that they call Dickens and Austen to mind.” (Entertainment Weekly)

“This is an astonishing book. It is astonishing on several levels: as a worm’s-eye view of the “undercity” of one of the world’s largest metropolises; as an intensely reported, deeply felt account of the lives, hopes and fears of people traditionally excluded from literate narratives; as a story that truly hasn’t been told before, at least not about India and not by a foreigner. But most of all, it is astonishing that it exists at all…. a searing account, in effective and racy prose, that reads like a thrilling novel but packs a punch Sinclair Lewis might have envied.” (The Washington Post) --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

About the Author

Katherine Boo is an investigative journalist focusing on matters of poverty and opportunity. A staff writer at the New Yorker magazine since 2001, she was previously a writer and editor at the Washington Post. Among the honours her work has received are a MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Grant, a National Magazine Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. This is her first book.