Boo spent three years in Annawadi, a slum beside Mumbai's international airport, reporting on the lives of garbage sorters, scam artists, and families crushed between corruption and aspiration. The book reads like a novel but every detail is documented. Its central insight is brutal: the poor don't fail because they lack ambition. They fail because the systems around them are rigged.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.