rtc. okay i really enjoyed this!! (as much as one can lol) i don't think it's life changing but i couldn't put it down and the fertility/motherhood strtc. okay i really enjoyed this!! (as much as one can lol) i don't think it's life changing but i couldn't put it down and the fertility/motherhood stuff is a unique flavor. check TW for sure!...more
Set over the course of 2008, we see how several families live in Annawadi, a slum on the edge of the Mumbai airport - a symbol of great wealth and proSet over the course of 2008, we see how several families live in Annawadi, a slum on the edge of the Mumbai airport - a symbol of great wealth and progress.
I read this for Friendathon, my readathon based on reading your friends' tastes, for the prompt to read a book that relates to their job - my friend Katie is a journalist, so I read a journalism book. I vlogged the readathon, and you can watch that here!
I don't read a lot of nonfiction to begin with, and very little in this area of expertise, so my review is coming from someone new to the subject. Katherine Boo is an American journalist who has specialized in covering the systems that perpetuate poverty and how, if at all, people can get out of it. She lived in India for several years after marrying an Indian man, and this book came out of her time there. I was initially skeptical of this point of view, but I think that Boo did her due diligence and then some to give a voice to those in Annawadi - a place where homes aren't big enough for families to all sleep on the floor, where toxic waste poisons every water source, where the education, justice, and government systems all use and abuse its people to keep them without resources. We follow several people living there, all using different strategies to try to get out of there. Lots of the young people dig through trash for any small pieces they could sell to the recycling plant. Another is trying to become the first female college graduate from Annawadi, a place where it's common for classrooms to not even have teachers half the time. Her mother is then trying to gain power politically by becoming the new slumlord. We see a family get torn apart and captured by the police because their neighbor set herself on fire and blamed them to get some sort of sympathy or money. This family has to play into the corruption of the police at every turn so that they have the slightest possible chance of being set free, which means that they're paying money they don't have. And all around them, people are dying from not having enough to survive, but from rampant su1c1de, and from violence that the police would never investigate because who could care about these people? It's frankly horrifying the pure volume of deaths this book tallies. This book succinctly covers how all-encompassing poverty is for those in it, and how the systems of power work diligently to keep resources from those who never had them to begin with. Their most successful trick? Dividing the impoverished against each other so no collective opposing the systems in power will ever come to fruition. This book's subtitle is "Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity". Do we get hope? To the reader, there does seem to be very little hope, as many of the people we follow are left worse than we found them - but these people also never stop clinging to the scraps of what hope they can find for a better life.
Overall, I thought this covered a lot of ground about systemic poverty in a short page count, and in a way that was digestible (but horrifying) to those new to the subject. I won't be leaving a rating because I'm so new, but I definitely think it did its job well....more
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