Here’s how this weeek’s arts and culture column begins:
“Immersion journalist” Katherine Boo is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her series about group homes for the intellectually disabled won the Washington Post the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She has been awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant.
She has also suffered from rheumatoid arthritis since childhood. Her health is frail. Still, she felt moved to spend four years quietly walking among, standing besde, and observing the people of Annawadi, a Mumbai slum hard by an international airport and a sewage lake.
Her 2012 book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” (Random House, $23.02), won the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and many others. A decade after publication, it’s still the best account I know of an author evincing true solidarity with the poor, love for our neighbor, and “activism” without a scintilla of politics or ideology.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE
Love!……”Writers (“and others”) who are Catholic without being Catholic”! Thank you dear Heather for going where most of us do not!
This reminds me of The City of Joy by Lapierre even though it’s a novel.
Oh that sounds good, had never heard of it, Michael–thanks and Easter blessings!