The author writes for the New Yorker and has made a career of reporting from among poor people around the world. The story here is of several characters in a particular slum near the airport in Mumbai. The author lived with these people as explained in a prologue. The work obviously hasn't done as much for me as for others; it won the national book award for non-fiction this year. Some reviews claim that this book is non-fiction with human or heart-felt stories that rival fiction. Unfortunately, I mostly noticed a superficiality or brevity that one would only expect in weak fiction. A fictional account similar to this story would, after all, have much more character development. This is easier to do in fiction, since fiction is untrue. Fiction also has to tie its stories together, have a theme or themes, use imagery, etc. But this book is journalism. My problem is probably just that reviews of this book lead me to expect something else. One review compared the book to Dickens. That is laughable.