Another book that wasn't on the list--shoot me.

I had time for another book outside the challenge.  This makes me think the challenge was too easy or else I'm just rushing through books and not taking the time to savor them.  It's a fault I have--rushing--but on a book as gripping as this I didn't have much choice.

Behind The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo.  Two families share a back wall of their crumbling stone shacks...their lives and fates cross and crumble even as their wall stood firm.  It's reality TV that's actually real...painfully real, way too real.

As Westerners in a big country with a Puritan tradition of law and justice, we don't understand sometimes what it's like to live in an environment where power exists to help the powerful and justice can be bought--no--must be bought.  I'm not so naive as to believe that many an American policeman or a council member or a minor official can't be bribed, but neither are we living in a culture of bribery.  (At least not among our minor officials; Congress may be a different animal.)

By the way, this book should be read by anyone administering an overseas charity.  If you really want to be sure that your contributions to educate the poor children of India are going to a good cause, ask for followup data.