It may seem grotesquely inappropriate to recall Primo Levi's struggles for survival in a Nazi camp while thinking of the apparently self-reliant individualists of a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai's airport - the setting of Katherine Boo's extraordinary first book, which describes a few months in the life of a young garbage trader, Abdul, and his friends and family.

After all, these plucky "slumdogs" may be - in at least one recent fantasy - India's next millionaires, part of the lucky 1 percent able to savor the five-star hotels that loom over Annawadi.

Certainly, as noted by Boo a staff writer at The New Yorker who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000, when she was a journalist at The Washington Post they are not considered poor by "official" Indian benchmarks. They are "among roughly 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991", when the central government "embraced economic liberalization", "part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism", in which a self-propelling economic system is geared to reward motivated and resourceful individuals with personal wealth.