Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity won the National Book Award (2012) and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among many others, and has appeared on numerous “best books of the year” lists. It is also the common reading for this year’s On the Same Page program, and the focus of numerous public events and courses on campus this Fall.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers weaves together the stories of a dozen or more residents of a vast slum near the Mumbai airport, many of whom subsist by recycling garbage thrown away by others.
A new exhibit in Moffitt Library showcases the variety of library collections pertaining to the On the Same Page theme. There are the usual suspects: books, dissertations, scholarly journal articles, and government documents about slum dwellers and waste recyclers in India. Also included are a personal narrative in Marathi, maps (historical and contemporary), pictorial works, statistics, magazine articles, and articles about poverty in Mumbai published in The Times of India of 1876 and from the same publication in 2005. The exhibit also includes video clips from the Media Resources Center collection.
The exhibit will be up until mid-October.