Boo’s first book is the result of four years of interviews and experiences in Annawadi, a terribly poor urban slum on the periphery of Mumbai’s airport. While adjacent to the modern airport and luxury hotels which serve the globalization of one of India’s largest cities, Annawadi remains trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of crushing poverty, disease, deprivation, and death. Nonetheless, individuals with courage, moral strength, and initiative surface, and while many of them are defeated, some hope remains. India’s illiteracy, corruption, and culture of inequality (castes remain) and male dominance and domestic violence, arranged marriages, the conflicts between Hindu and Muslim all make for discouraging and depressing news. Boo continues to find a slow, generally upward trend in the fortunes of the extremely poor, but her detailed and individualized portraits of some of Annawadi’s families give one a sober and somber outlook. Corruption, bribery, stealing of government grants and private charity combine to doom most of the slum dwellers to short, miserable, disease-ridden lives. The individuals (Asha, Zerunhisa, Abdul, Sunil, Kanu, and the others) seem to blur into a semi-solid mass of unhappiness where even the smallest spark of mental acuity and ambition are drowned in the sewage lake and the cruelty of those whose public trust is constantly abused for private gain—police, judges, doctors, hospitals, schools. Ugh, but good for Boo—a brave, talented, committed, and moral person.