书名：Behind the Beautiful Forevers永恒美丽的背后/地下城

难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1030L
作者：Katherine Boo凯瑟琳·布
出版社名称：Random House Trade
出版时间：2014
语种：英文
ISBN：9780812979329
商品尺寸：13.1 x 1.9 x 20.3 cm
包装：平装
页数：256
★一本让比尔·盖茨流着眼泪读完的人性救赎之书，诺贝尔经济奖得主阿马蒂亚·森动容推荐！

★普利策奖新闻得主深度追踪访查孟买地下城底层的人群，历时三年完成的震撼人心之作！
★斩获美国国家图书奖、《洛杉矶时报》图书大奖、麦克阿瑟天才奖等9项大奖！
★席卷英国、美国、德国、法国、荷兰、日本、西班牙等10多个国家！
★入围2012《纽约时报》《华盛顿邮报》十大好书榜，入围2013年普利策奖！
★《纽约时报》《出版家周刊》《华盛顿邮报》《奥普拉杂志》《经济学人》等媒体共同推荐！
★震撼的叙述、详实的资料、生动的文笔，勾勒出艰难时世中人性的善良、隐忍与希望交织的生命万象！一本写给万千文艺青年的生命之书，告诉我们贫穷永远掩盖不了理想的光芒！

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

Review
“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.”  — NewYorker

“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
在这里，人像垃圾一样被严格分类，正义像垃圾一样彼此交易，生命更像垃圾一样一文不名。

普利策奖得主凯瑟琳·布，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年间这些居民们的生活状况。她用震撼的叙述、详实的资料和生动的文笔，向读者展示了写着“永恒美丽”标语的孟买机场附近一个被忽略的世界——安纳瓦迪。在那里，绝大多数人以捡拾垃圾为生，住在由铁皮、宝丽板和油布钉成的房子里，还有些人干脆露天而睡；在那里人们饱受贫穷和腐败困扰，暴力和死亡是永远的主题，希望与绝望交替浮现。
仅仅因为比贫民窟其他人稍稍富裕一点，靠回收垃圾致富依稀看到生活希望的侯赛因一家，在邻居的陷害和腐败官员的压榨下回到一无所有的起点；靠蚕食其他穷人而翻身的阿莎，夜幕降临时在丈夫和孩子的目送中去出卖自己的身体以求安稳；身患残障的希塔为了敲诈街坊，引火自焚却弄巧成拙真的丢了性命；十五岁的街童卡鲁在登机门外被人残忍地谋杀，却被判死于“不可挽回的病”……安纳瓦第的底层生活者们相互隔阂、无力抗争的脆弱场景跃然纸上，展示了人们为了生活而努力奋斗，为了家庭作出牺牲，并且用他们自己的方式，以创新和创业精神创造了充满活力的地方经济。
人，只要还活着就够了吗？这部几乎蘸着泪水完成的重磅作品，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。它不仅是一个关于印度的故事，更是全世界需要面对的问题。
凯瑟琳·布（Katherine Boo），《纽约客杂志》的专职作家。曾任《华盛顿邮报》的记者和编辑，过去二十年都在报导贫困地区、思索社会资源不对等，个人如何摆脱贫困等议题。历年来，她对于底层社会真实生活的报导，为她赢得了麦克阿瑟天才奖、普利策奖、美国国家杂志奖之专题写作奖等殊荣。

Katherine Boois a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post. Her reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. For the last decade, she has divided her time between the United States and India.
He cracked the door of the family hut and looked out. His home sat midway down a row of hand-built, spatchcock dwellings; the lopsided shed where he stowed his trash was just next door. To reach this shed unseen would deprive his neighbors of the pleasure of turning him in to the police.

He didn’t like the moon, though: full and stupid bright, illuminating a dusty open lot in front of his home. Across the lot were the shacks of two dozen other families, and Abdul feared he wasn’t the only person peering out from behind the cover of a plywood door. Sonic people in this slum wished his family ill because of the old Hindu-Muslim resentments. Others resented his family for the modern reason, economic envy. Doing waste work that many Indians found contemptible, Abdul had lifted his large family above subsistence.
The open lot was quiet, at least—freakishly so. A kind of beach-front for a vast pool of sewage that marked the slum’s eastern border, the place was bedlam most nights: people fighting, cooking, flirting, bathing, tending goats, playing cricket, waiting for water at a public tap, lining up outside a little brothel, or sleeping off the effects of the grave-digging liquor dispensed from a hut two doors down from Abdul’s own. The pressures that built up in crowded huts on narrow slumlanes had only this place, the maidam, to escape. But after the fight, and the burning of the woman called the One Leg, people had retreated to their huts.
Now, among the feral pigs, water buffalo, and the usual belly-down splay of alcoholics, there seemed to be just one watchful presence: a small, unspookable boy from Nepal. He was sitting, arms around knees, in a spangly blue haze by the sewage lake—the reflected neon signage of a luxury hotel across the water. Abdul didn’t mind if the Nepali boy saw him go into hiding. This kid, Adarsh, was no spy for the police, he just liked to stay out late, to avoid his mother and her nightly rages.
It was as safe a moment as Abdul was going to get. He bolted for the trash shed and closed the door behind him.
Inside was carbon-black, frantic with rats, and ct relieving. His storeroom— 120 square feet, piled high to a leaky roof with the things in this world Abdul knew how to handle. Empty water and whiskey bottles, mildewed newspapers, used tampon applicators, wadded aluminum foil, umbrellas stripped to the ribs by monsoons, broken shoelaces, yellowed Q-tips, snarled cassette tape, torn plastic casings that once held imitation Barbies. Somewhere in the darkness, there was a Berbee or Barblie itself, maimed in one of the experiments to which children who had many toys seemed to subject those toss no longer favored. Abdul had become expert, over the years, at minimizing distraction. He placed all such dolls in his trash pile tits-down.