{"product_id":"9781429995184","title":"The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India","description":"\u003cp\u003eA \u003ci\u003eGlobe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e Best Books of the Year 2011 Title\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSiddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter for \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast proceeding and Thomas L. Friedman declared the world flat. Deb's experience interviewing the call-center staff led him to undertake this book and travel throughout the subcontinent. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Beautiful and the Damned \u003c\/i\u003eexamines India's many contradictions through various individual and extraordinary perspectives. With lyrical and commanding prose, Deb introduces the reader to an unforgettable group of Indians, including a Gatsby-like mogul in Delhi whose hobby is producing big-budget gangster films that no one sees; a wiry, dusty farmer named Gopeti whose village is plagued by suicides and was the epicenter of a riot; and a sad-eyed waitress named Esther who has set aside her dual degrees in biochemistry and botany to serve Coca-Cola to arms dealers at an upscale hotel called Shangri La. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLike no other writer, Deb humanizes the post-globalization experience—its advantages, failures, and absurdities. India is a country where you take a nap and someone has stolen your job, where you buy a BMW but still have to idle for cows crossing your path. A personal, narrative work of journalism and cultural analysis in the same vein as Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's \u003ci\u003eRandom Family \u003c\/i\u003eand V. S. Naipaul's India series, \u003ci\u003eThe Beautiful and the Damned \u003c\/i\u003eis an important and incisive new work.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Beautiful and the Damned \u003c\/i\u003eis a Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction title for 2011.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Farrar, Straus and Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47134190698736,"sku":"9781429995184","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781429995184_p0.jpg?v=1769904032","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781429995184","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}