Description
Book SynopsisFamines are becoming smaller and rarer, but optimism about the possibility of a famine-free future must be tempered by the threat of global warming. That is just one of the arguments that Cormac O Grada, one of the world's leading authorities on the history and economics of famine, develops in this wide-ranging book, which provides crucial new pers
Trade ReviewOne of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2015 "[I]ts final chapter offers salient discussion of future possibilities and constraints for food security."--Liz Young, Times Higher Education "This book is written in calm prose, but its message is urgent: continue as we are and poverty will grow on our doorsteps."--Danny Dorling, Times Higher Education "The Irish economist Cormac O? Gra?da has written a rarity: a coolly rational, cautiously cheerful book about the most viscerally upsetting subject imaginable, mass death from hunger...For O? Gra?da, perhaps the world's expert on the history and economics of famine, now is the time to understand this long-standing terror."--Charles C. Mann, Pacific Standard "The breadth of primary and secondary resources referenced is notable throughout, and this excellent book by a leading scholar is accessible to all readers."--Choice "Cormac O Grada knows more than most people about famines, historical and modern, and his short book of essays, Eating People is Wrong, is superb."--Diane Coyle, Enlightened Economist "The overriding impression one gets from reading Cormac O Grada's latest, brilliant book is that famines the world over are an ugly human stain."--David Nally, Irish Times "Dealing with some of the most horrendous aspects of famine, the five essays collected here are meticulously scholarly and at the same time arrestingly vivid."--John Gray, New Statesman "O Grada's book offers a sobering reminder of the importance of making judgments based on good data and unhindered by ideological filters."--Douglas Gollin, Foreign Affairs
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 1 Eating People Is Wrong: Famine's Darkest Secret? 11 2 "Sufficiency and Sufficiency and Sufficiency": Revisiting the Great Bengal Famine of 1943-44 38 3 Markets and Famines: Pre-industrial Europe and Beyond 92 4 Great Leap into Great Famine 130 5 Famine Is Not the Problem-For Now 174 Bibliography 209 Index 231
