Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity has been well covered elsewhere, so I will not attempt a full review here.  Suffice it to say that I cannot recommend it enough.  One of the remarkable things about the book is that it would be unreadable if it weren't for Boo's perfectly dispassionate, detached, documentary style.  A drop of emotion, and the events described in the book would be overwhelming even to the most atrophied heart.  What really sent me for a loop, though, is that more than once while reading I thought that perhaps there are places and times when a government does have a legitimate role that goes beyond merely ensuring that individual rights are not infringed upon as I usually like to maintain, and that role might reasonably be – can I really be thinking this? – to enforce a one-child policy.  Would China be where it is today if they never had such a policy, or never enforced it?  Would that be a good thing?  And for whom?