Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Memoirs & Coffee Book Group to Meet


The next meeting of Bernardsville Public Library’s book discussion group, Memoirs and Coffee, will be held on Tuesday, October 23 at 10:30 am in the library’s Community Room.  Pat Kennedy-Grant, Readers’ Services Manager for the library, will lead the discussion of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, And Hope In A Mumbai Undercity” (2012) by Katherine Boo. [The author will not be present.]

In "Behind the Beautiful Forevers," which is based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.  With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, the book carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.  Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote of the book, “[An] exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter. …. Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted.”

Katherine Boo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post. Her reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. For the last decade, she has divided her time between the United States and India. This is her first book.

There is no charge and no sign-up is needed to join the discussion.  Call the library at 766-0118 for more information.

No comments:

Post a Comment