kpl.gov/book-club-in-a-bag ” Publishersweekly.com leave an indelible Boo’s rigorous inquiry rigorous Boo’s “ - and transcendent prose impression.

Discussion Questions - Source: issued by publisher. Source: ans view their neighbors? Does economic uncertainty affect relationships relationships ans view their neighbors? Does economic uncertainty affect you live? where In the Author’s Note Katherine Boo emphasizes the volatility of an age Note Katherine Boo emphasizes the volatility 8. In the Author’s the planet, government supports in which capital moves quickly around Had the author followed the decline, and temporary work proliferates. or months, would you have families of Annawadi for only a few weeks of that volatility? understanding of the effects come away with a different Does uncertainty about their homes and incomes change how Annawadi Who do you think had the best life in the book, and why? 7. Who do you think had the best life in Many Annawadians—Hindu, Muslim, and Christian—spend less time 6. Many Annawadians—Hindu, Muslim, and a pink younger, when they were observance than they did in religious unused. In a time of goes largely temple on the edge of the sewage lake for the slumdwellers, why might hope and constant improvisation relative faith still play does religious What role practice be diminishing? religious in the slumdwellers’ lives? Does Asha have a point when she argues that something isn’t wrong wrong that something isn’t 5. Does Asha have a point when she argues to exposure right? How does constant if the powerful people say that it’s of right and wrong? internal understanding corruption change a person’s Asha grew up in rural poverty, and the teenaged marriage arranged by and the teenaged marriage arranged rural poverty, up in 4. Asha grew In Annawadi, than he worked. man who drank more her family was to a Manju a life far calculated risks to give her daughter she takes a series of women such as Meena. What does hopeful than that of other young more What life chances? her daughter’s to improve Asha lose by her efforts to you, in the end? choices understandable Asha’s does she gain? Were The lives of ordinary women—their working lives, domestic lives, and lives, domestic lives, working women—their of ordinary 3. The lives The Forevers. an important part of Behind the Beautiful inner lives—are of such accounts that she’d felt a shortage author has noted elsewhere and Asha have urban India. Do women like Zehrunisa in nonfiction about had in the villages in an urban slum than they would have freedom more by living in the city? born? What is Meena, a Dalit, spared they were where lack, in your view? do Meena, Asha, and Zehrunisa still What freedoms As Abdul works day and night with garbage, keeping his head down, down, his head keeping garbage, night with day and works 2. As Abdul of him think citydwellers other some family, his large to support trying him? view other people to how react Abdul How does too. as garbage, try to sort-of friend, Sunil, do Abdul and his How you react? How would people’s in the face of other self-esteem themselves and sustain protect contempt? Katherine (Kate) J. Boo Book Summary is an award-winning journalist and In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncom- author known primarily for writing promising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is about America’s poor and disadvan- made human. taged. Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near A native of Washington, D.C., Boo the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are attended the College of William and electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, Mary and graduated summa cum sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer laude from Barnard College and people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars began her career in journalism with from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the editorial positions at Washington’s middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful City Paper and then the Washington daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first Monthly. From there she went to the female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a Washington Post, from 1993 to 2003. fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the In 2000, her series for the Post about good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.” group homes for the mentally im- But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking trag- paired won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The Pulitzer judges noted edy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions that her work “disclosed wretched neglect and abuse in the city’s group over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the ten- homes for the mentally retarded, which forced officials to acknowledge derest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true the conditions and begin reforms.” contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imagina- In 2003, she joined the staff of The New Yorker, to which she had been tions and courage of the people of Annawadi. contributing since 2001. One of her subsequent New Yorker articles, “The With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human be- Marriage Cure,” won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in ings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful 2004. The article chronicled state-sponsored efforts to teach poor people Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s in an Oklahoma community about marriage in hopes that the classes hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget. (From would help people avoid or escape poverty. Another of Boo’s New Yorker the publisher.) articles, “After Welfare,” won the 2002 Sidney Hillman Award, which hon- ors articles that advance the cause of social justice. She was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, from 2002 through 2006. In 2002, she won a MacArthur Fellowship.[7] Discussion Questions In 2012, Boo published her first book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, 1. Barbara Ehrenreich calls Behind the Beautiful Forevers “one of the Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity , a non-fiction account of life in most powerful indictments of economic inequality I’ve ever read.” Yet the Annawadi slums of Mumbai, India. (Author bio from Wikipedia .) the book shows the world of the Indian rich—lavish Bollywood parties, an increasingly glamorous new airport—almost exclusively through the eyes of the Annawadians. Are they resentful? Are they envious? How does the wealth that surrounds the slumdwellers shape their own expectations and hopes?