Last night's fun: Katherine Boo at Magers & Quinn

I counted as many people as I could see, squished as I was with my back to a bookcase, and with people on either side and full chairs in front of me and people I couldn't see, lined up in the aisles of the stacks all around me. But I counted well over 100 people, stuffed between "Food and Cooking," and "Pets, Animal Studies, Insects and Birds."

We were at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis' Uptown neighborhood last night, waiting to hear Katherine Boo talk about her book, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers."

When she emerged from the stacks, Boo settled on a stool, looked at us with bemusement and said, "My publisher said, 'What is the point of going to Minnesota? Nobody would turn out.' This is amazing."

Then she apologized--normally she shows slides, but the setup at Magers & Quinn was too crowded and there was nowhere to put a screen.

Boo is slender and blond,with hands gnarled from rheumatoid arthritis (she didn't sign books but stamped them with a special stamp); she doesn't look hardy but oh what an amazing feat of determined reporting her book is. Boo spent three years in a slum in Mumbai called Annawadi, documenting the lives of some of the 80,000 families who squat on the land--garbage pickers, scavengers, entrepreneurs and thieves.

She made it clear that while the people she wrote about live in horrendous conditions of filth and poverty, she was not looking for heart-breaking stereotypes but was looking to get to know people well enough to portray them in all their complexity.

"My aim is to document the lives of complex people," she said. She set about doing this by spending those years hanging around, observing, talking (with the help of two translators), videotaping, audio taping, photographing. "Every community is different, every person is different, and I think the details matter."

Boo read, briefly, from her prologue, a scene in which a teen-age garbage-sorter named Abdul flees the police and hides in his ink-black, garbage filled, rat-infested storage shed. "He'd been sorting since he was about six years old, because tuberculosis and garbage work had wrecked his father's lungs," she read. "Abdul's motor skills had developed around his labor. ...In the early years, he'd sat in a classroom where nothing much happened. Then there had been only work. Work that churned so much filth into the air it turned his snot black. Work more boring than dirty. Work he expected to be doing for the rest of his life."

The audience at M&Q had plenty of questions. How did she report? What about the caste system--is it still strong? How did her presence affect the lives of these people?

"My presence altered the course of events immensely at first," Boo said. But people quickly grew accustomed to her. "Local people have a lot more to worry about than a reporter in their midst," she said. "Every day, they're getting up and trying to figure out what they're going to do today," to make money, to get food.

When her talk was over, there was one last comment. A man in the front row spoke up: "Your words are so pictorial we didn't need slides," he said. And then threaded his way out of the crowded room, toward the long line of customers waiting to have their books stamped.