We haven’t had a meeting of the Compliance Week book club for a while, so let me recommend a title that all ethics and compliance officers should read immediately: Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo. (Random House, 298 pps, $27.)
I’ll start with the literary praise Boo deserves. She tells the tale of everyday life in Annawadi, a slum next to the Mumbai international airport in India, and the petty hardships and corruption that overrun the lives of the people who live there. The plot centers on one woman falsely accusing her neighbors of a crime, but that’s only one of many calamities that keep pulling everyone back into the mire of poverty where they’ve lived for so long. What’s more, while Boo’s story reads like a novel, it is indeed a work of nonfiction; all the characters are real people, and the travails the book recounts actually happened to them from 2008 through 2011. Boo occasionally mentions larger events, such as the rise of a globalized India or the Al Qaeda terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008. But mostly the story dwells on real people in India’s poorest places, trying to manage their way through life like the rest of us do.
