Half of the ten million inhabitants of Calcutta, India, live in slums. Anand Nagar, the City of Joy, is one of the 3,000 slums in that city. It is a reclaimed swamp the size of two football fields inhabited by 70,000 men, women, and children, most of them refugees from the drought or monsoon-stricken surrounding rural areas. The City of Joy has the highest population density in the world. Most of the people who survive in this living hell live on less than ten U.S. cents a day.
These people are able to reconstruct the social, religious, and family traditions of their villages in the vast slums of Calcutta. Here they wage a gallant struggle to preserve their dignity amid conditions of desperate poverty and overcrowding.
The author of The City of Joy, Dominique Lapierre, 56, has written a string of bestsellers. In 1960, Lapierre and American Larry Collins wrote a book answering why Paris, condemned in 1944 to an apocalyptic destruction by Hitler, escaped undamaged by the war. Is Paris Burning? became an instant success. Seven years later, they produced...Or I'll Dress You in Mourning, about the Spanish Civil War. In 1971 Lapierre and Collins wrote O Jerusalem, the story of the birth of the state of Israel and of the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1975 their Freedom at Midnight described life in India at the end of British rule and the accession to independence of the Indian and Pakistani people. The Fifth Horseman in 1980 became another publishing success, translated into thirty languages.
While writing Freedom at Midnight, Lapierre developed an interest in India and founded an organization to support the children of lepers in
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