Rating: 
Summary: Only good as a testimony
Review: A French priest goes to live among the poorest of the poorest in Calcutta, including the people with leper.It is said to be a true story, and then it is a moving account of life in that place, where an American doctor and some Indian people also share these most difficult lives. Lapierre tells a moving message: joy, solidarity, friendship, can be found even in the hardest of circumstances. Love is the only way to overcome poorness, sickness and hunger. While all that is true, Lapierre's book comes to the verge of being a glorification of poverty. As literature, is almost corny and artificially dramatic; as a testimony of what goes on in there and how the human spirit sometimes excels in the midst of harshness, it's good. I'm sorry not to like it much or sounding cynical, especially since I appreciate its message, but it is only a report from dire poverty, not a very good novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Never satisfied of life? Read City of Joy.
Review: A great account of human altruism that exists between the poorest of the poor. We, who have so much material gains should learn from them to be satisfied with what we have. This book is not fiction. I salute La Pierre for capturing an ineffable scene from Calcutta in a book.
Rating:
Summary: Simply Superb
Review: A very nicely written book. If you feel inadequate about anything in life then read this book. It will make you realize what is really necessary.Changed my views about many things in life.
Rating:
Summary: a book of hope
Review: After reading this book you realize how meaningless our daily worries might be, how every single day in our lives has a deep dignity and should be enjoyed thoroughly. It's abook of hope, which makes you dream of a better world but also gives you the urge to start creating it yourself...
Rating:
Summary: This book is the best ever!
Review: City of Joy captures the true life and love of the people in Calcutta. Never have I experienced such an incredible city or book. I felt like I was back in Calcutta as I read this masterpiece!
Rating:
Summary: Should be required reading in American schools
Review: City of Joy is a true account of the inhabitants of Calcutta's worst slums. The author weaves together the stories of a family who moved from the drought-starved countryside in search of a better life, a young doctor from the United States, and numereous others to paint a rich, textured picture of unbelievable suffering and yet, incredible humanity. This book made me stop over and over to contemplate how lucky I was to have been born where and when I was - in relative wealth, comfort, and freedom beyond the wildest dreams of the majority of the world's population. Go ahead and see the movie if you want too, but not until well after you've read and absorbed the book.
Rating: 
Summary: A self-indulgent, unworthy book that should be binned
Review: Everything about this books screams white supremacy. Lapierre claims to have "researched this book for two years", but this shoddy work is replete with silly, irritating mistakes - 'Bhagvan' is apparently 'the most powerful God in Hinduism'; a charpoy is something you drink from. But that is the least of it.
I can overlook the inaccurate research (or lack thereof), I can forgive the racism and the advertisement for imperialism that the book is. After all, one of my favourite books - Gone With The Wind - succumbs to similar failures. What I cannot condone are the writing and the message of this book.
It's a novel 'based on true stories', it claims. Why, then, is there no plot, no flow of events, no climax, no ending, no discernible anything to differentiate it from a painstaking chronicle of everyday events in a not-so-everyday place that starts and ends for no reason? The characters are discussed and revealed very well, true, but there is absolutely no development. The people in City of Joy are static: no one, not even the two foreigners, undergo any process of meaningful change. Superficially, they're disgusted by the way the people in the slum live, they admire the slum dwellers' capacity for love and joy - these are things they learn and find out as they live in Anand Nagar... but that's prosaic to the point where you want to start ripping pages from the book for sheer want of some fresh happening.
And then there's the message. The book claims to be about love and joy thriving in the worst possible conditions, but whereas it explores these 'worst possible conditions' in loving variety and detail (lepers' colonies, children drowning in open drains, starvation, filth, maggot-infested internal organs of the slum-dwelling sick, typhoid and tuberculosis, the privations suffered by rickshaw pullers, the 'human horses'...), all that Lapierre says about the survival of life and joy in these conditions is... that it has survived. On and on he goes about men keeling over and dying as they pull rickshaws, only to be kicked aside and eagerly replaced by other men desperate for work, and at the end of a 10-page chapter, there's a line that goes - he was happy to be alive. Well, one sentence repeated over and over at the end of different incidents does not a message make.
And of course, I hate the way the book grosses you out for the sake of effect. I'm all for having my heart wrung and made to shed tears of blood, but at least don't do it this blatantly, without even a pretence of plot to cover it up! Even Passion of the Christ was better in this respect, and that's saying something.
Rating:
Summary: Brings unreachable world to within vague comprehension
Review: Fantastic effort and truly meaningful contribution to humanity. Very believable and very sincere. Good for folks who are seriously interested in the rest of the world. Sort of like "HOOP DREAMS", but for absolute life and death stakes. Started to drag after lists and lists of vermin/festivals/diseases/calamities however.
Rating: 
Summary: Dr. Pangloss Is Alive and Well
Review: I can't agree with all the positive reviews this book got. Yes, it carries you along; yes, I don't doubt these are real people, and that the author really knows his Calcutta. But I was really bugged by Lapierre's "everything's for the best in this best of all possible worlds" attitude. One episode I remember: a healthy young woman from a poor family being given in arranged marriage to a leper. Lepers, we are informed cosily, have unusually strong sex drives, even though they're dying. The woman, of course, will become part of the leper colony; she will contract leprosy; her children will be lepers. This doesn't bother Lapierre - he paints a charming portrait of the wedding feast - he writes about the tragedy as if, gee, if you look at it in just the right light, folks, it's an affirmation of the life force! This is the treatment everything tragic receives, and we get the idea that the physical plane is easily circumvented, and that if you give it a bit of the old college try, life in Calcutta can put you on a higher spiritual plane, where you're blissfully beyond suffering. It's remisiscent of the Rosicrucian theory that Christ never really suffered on the cross, he controlled the pain with his psychic powers. No, I've never been to Calcutta but my husband is from the area - he used to have to go there occasionally for business purposes, and he said that after an hour he always had a severe headache from the clamor, dust, and car fumes. Why is smog a horrible thing in L.A. or Paris, but just another aid to a higher plane in Calcutta? I don't doubt it's possible to find happiness in Calcutta, and I am sure many good people can be found there. I don't even argue with the idea that we first-world people can't appreciate life the way people who live on the edge do. But "The City of Joy" is just too facile. I was glad to hear of the protests staged by Calcuttans when "City of Joy" the movie was being shot in the slums. I got much more out of the description of Calcutta found in chapter 5 of "India: A Million Mutinies Now" by V.S. Naipaul.
Rating: 
Summary: The Book really makes you think what's important in life
Review: I couldn't put it down. Great symbolism. Makes you feel like that you were actually there
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