Behind the Beautiful Forevers

*Behind the Beautiful Forevers* argues that poverty in the globalized city is not a fate people fail to escape through lack of effort, but a system actively maintained — by corrupt institutions that convert every misfortune of the poor into revenue, by markets that transmit distant shocks straight into the stomachs of scavengers, and by an inequality so steep that the undercity's residents find it easier to fight each other than the order above them. Through Abdul's doomed vow to stay "ice" in a world of water, Boo shows that the deepest damage of unequal societies is moral: when honesty is punished and cunning rewarded, hope survives, but it is slowly stripped of its ethics. The book endures because it makes a statistical abstraction — the global poor — into particular people whose choices, under the circumstances, make heartbreaking sense.

Katherine Boo is an American investigative journalist who has spent her career reporting on poverty and how public systems fail — or fleece — the disadvantaged. A former editor and reporter at *The Washington Post*, where her exposé of abuse in group homes for the intellectually disabled won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2000, she became a staff writer at *The New Yorker* and received a MacArthur "genius" fellowship in 2002. Married to the Indian-born scholar Sunil Khilnani, Boo began reporting in Mumbai in 2007, partly to test whether her document-driven methods could work outside the United States. *Behind the Beautiful Forevers*, her first book, won the 2012 National Book Award for Nonfiction, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was adapted by David Hare into a stage production at Britain's National Theatre. Notably, Boo uses no composite characters and no changed names; everything in the book is drawn from witnessed events, recordings, and public records.