‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’ is essential Manu Joseph, complete with hits and misses

Here’s what I can confidently say about any Manu Joseph book, and I have read them all since Serious Men: I have never not been entertained.

And here’s what I can confidently say about his columns: they are always anticlimactic.

A very fun pop-feminist filmmaker, who does not react with Pavlovian rage at the mention of Manu Joseph, once told me he doesn’t know how to end his pieces. I agreed. Joseph’s first nonfiction book, Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us, shares this quality. But until we reach the end, it is super-fun.

Anger coursing through

Joseph wrote this book for, I think, two reasons.

Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us is essentially all his theories he has cyclically pushed through his essays (the second-best idea in a group is always the best idea; revolutions and reform happen not out of altruism but second-rung elites fighting the top-order elites, etc) put inside a hook-y framework: why the Indian poor doesn’t tear us apart in one of the world’s unhappiest and most unequal regions? As a primer on Manu Joseph, this is useful.

The second is that Joseph currently resides in a posh colony in Gurugram, which is nicely complicated by the fact that he experienced poverty as a young man. Joseph’s relentless distrust of urban currents is...

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