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Behind The Beautiful Forever Summary

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The book, Behind the Beautiful forever, by Katherine Boo is an insightful and informative non-fiction account of a slum called Annawadi in India and the interconnected lives of the families and inhabitants of the community. It is a story of abject poverty, corruption, and inequalities, but also a story of hope which showed in the slum dwellers dreams and aspirations despite the limited opportunities. It is a story of 3 major families, with other certain slum dwellers such as the scavengers and road boys and their daily strife and living, until an incidence occurred that changed the lives of all those involved. This book got its name from the advert of Italian tiles on the wall that divided the airport from the slum which read Beautiful Forever. The aim of this review is to bring to light how social inequality is a public health issue that …show more content…

She allowed us to see the working minds behind their respective actions. She made us see the struggles of the people living in Annawadi, which was deliberately hidden with a wall dividing the slum from the airport, in order to hide the stark poverty in the slum from the affluent area around the airport. Boo wrote that only the smoke plumes of Annawadi’s cooking fires could be seen after the wall was built.
The inequality portrayed in the book is still very much an issue in the world today and it is a growing threat to public health. Inequalities limits access to basic needs of life, it restricts access to resources and opportunities as a result of uneven distribution of rights and privileges, access to education or a judicial system, housing, social power, and despite daily strife of those at the receiving end, they keep getting poorer while the rich keep getting richer thus widening the gap further as seen in this quote by an annawadi girl “We try so many things’…‘but the world doesn’t move in our

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