The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 3 June 2013
by Katherine Boo
We are lucky. Incredibly lucky. We can sit here and write book reviews for the Internet. We can sit here and read book reviews on the internet. Most of us don't feel also the pressure to get outside and collect as much filthy recyclable garbage we can find, so we can gather the few pennies or dollars necessary to keep our family fed and housed in a rented slum in the shadow of a lake full of sewage. That's how lucky we are. And we count our blessings whenever we see photographs of the very poor in third world countries, though the very poor are around us here at home, too. We may not be able to imagine how the very poor can live. What we imagine, most likely, is our own despair at losing our comfortable lives, and the hopelessness of abject poverty. But here's the thing that Katherine Boo is gifted at recognizing: there are remnants of hope. How else can any of us go on living? She recognizes that, in a global economy that provides millions of tons of recyclable garbage, there are paths people in even the most impovershed situations find to make their way toward an incrementally better existence. These people, too, dream of buying the latest iPod, getting an education, getting out of the slum and joining the "big people" in the middle-class overcity. In this compelling book, Boo takes us into a small slum near the Mumbai international airport. Annawadi is a collection of a few hundred shacks near a lake of waste and not far at all from luxurious airport hotels. The contrast is striking and haunting to Western sensibilities.
Katherine Boo spent more than three years exploring the lives of the people who lived in this slum. There is a Muslim family who have made a bit of a living on garbage recycling so that they are comparitively well-off and planning to buy a patch of land in a slightly better part of the city. There are also many Hindus, and there are the many layers of caste that remain in Indian society, though, in the slum, these distinctions become less important. There is an ambitious woman who aspires to become a slum lord, and her daughter who is going to college and teaching the children of the slum. All of them are ambitious and enterprising. And all of them are up against a system of corruption that keeps them disenfranchised and powerless against forces of money and power. Some of these people play the game better than others. Others resort to suicide as a way to take revenge on those by whom they feel opressed. It is a complicated and strangely compelling story.
The author successfully personalizes the tale by getting us to know sixteen year-old Abdul, the successful garbage picker, Asha the aspiring slum lord, Manju her college student daughter, and Fatima, the bitter One-Leg. And there are many others here, family, neighbors, and officials. The book reads like a novel, but, as the author indicates in a moving afterword, is entirely based upon reportage and events she witnessed herself.
While the setting and the story of powerlessness can make the reader anticipate a depressing time with this book, there is something curiously uplifting about it, as well. In desperate places and times, people here retain their hope and ambition, and even their dignity. It is a surprise, and their story is enriching as well as educational. Does this fact mean we should not fix the society at the bottom of which they are trapped? Certainly not. The level of corruption and the sheer broken quality of the global capitalist system is a crime against all humanity. The moral despair that this engenders in the most vulnerable of world citizens hardens humanity against humanity. We can do better than merely appeal to the wishes of the stockholders.
The book is compelling. Katherine Boo is a brilliant reporter. This reader recommends this book most highly. It will change how you think about your relationship with consumption and waste. It will make you rethink material poverty and moral poverty. This is one of those rare books that can change the reader for good.
(Katherine Boo is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" grant, a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and was awarded the National Book Award for this book in 2012.)