VERO BEACH — In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo puts human faces on a bewildering age of global change and inequality 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.
The New York Times book reviewer called it “a book of extraordinary intelligence and humanity – beyond groundbreaking.”
Seasonal Vero Beach resident Jonna Mackin, Ph.D., will review Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death & Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, on Monday, March 2, at the Book Review Breakfast sponsored by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in the Richardson Center of the Mueller Campus, Indian River State College, 6155 College Lane, Vero Beach. The event begins with a continental breakfast on the veranda at 9:30 a.m., followed by the book review at 10 a.m. The book review breakfast is free and open to the public.
Boo spent three years among the residents of the Annawadi slum, and she jolts the reader’s consciousness with the opposing realities of poverty and wealth in contemporary India. 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 insightful and uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the 21st century’s hidden worlds—and into the hearts of families impossible to forget.
Dr. Mackin teaches American literature, identity studies and expository writing at Dartmouth College. She received her BA at Coe College, her MA at the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD at Rutgers University. Her thesis, Subject to laughter: Comedy and ethnicity in contemporary American fiction is based on the premise that comedy arises out of social tensions and that comic pleasure has the power to influence the politics of racial and ethnic collectives.
The Vero Beach Branch of the AAUW is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization that operates to promote equality for all women and girls through advocacy, education, philanthropy and research.
Visit www.veroBeach-fl.aauw.net for more information.