Katherine Boo Quotes
In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.
Boo, Katherine. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. Random House, 2012.
The United States had just ousted the popularly elected leader Patrice Lumumba {640611}, and backed Mobuto. Lumumba was an idealist who was not corrupt at all, but were not so sure about our new protégé. Sadly he turned out to be one of the worst kleptocrats of all time, and he stole with more United States money than we gave to many nations in toto. Many believe that one of the reasons, corruption of our “allied” leaders was so bad lies in the wording of this cable. Note that to the State Department writers there was “normal” corruption as opposed to excessive corruption. Once that view is taken there is a constant battle to determine whether each new act of corruption is “normal “ or not, and corruption is simply lessened by pushing back against the most abnormal schemes. These critics advocate a zero tolerance for corruption especially with United States AID money. The State Department has been ambivalent and have often used the corruption system to bribe leaders to obtain national objectives.
Katherine "Kate" J. Boo is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has won the MacArthur "genius" award (2002) and the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012), and her work earned the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Washington Post. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 2003. Her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity won nonfiction prizes from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
