Synopsis
"This is a really fine contribution and delivers what it claims: a short account of the long history of famines in the world. Ó Gráda tells a well-integrated story, with excellent analytical content and empirical richness. This is an impeccably chiseled product by one of the world's leading famine analysts."—Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize-winning economist
"Ó Gráda tells an important story of the history of famine from earliest times until the present, and offers prognostications for the future. There is very little to rival this book. Famine is the most comprehensive short treatment of the subject available."—William Chester Jordan, author of The Great Famine
"This is an important book. Cormac Ó Gráda lays out a history of famine around the world and uses this to extract common themes around the causes, morphology, and consequences of and reactions to famine. Famine makes fascinating reading."—Peter Walker, Tufts University
"Original and important. The history of famine has not ended. Famine is relevant and timely."—Joachim von Braun, coauthor of Famine in Africa
Publishers Weekly
Author and University College Dublin economics professor Ó Gráda (Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, Black '47 and Beyond) examines the causes of famine, from Biblical times to the present, in order to refute Parson Malthus' still-influential 1798 contention that unchecked population growth leads to famine. In case after case, (the Great Irish famine of the late 1840s, the Nazi blockade of Leningrad, etc.), Ó Gráda finds price spikes, crop failures, climate change, floods, droughts, civil strife and other factors behind devastating food shortages. While the effects of famine are horrible-including not just mass sickness and death but infanticide and child abandonment-the corresponding population decrease reverses relatively quickly, as compared to the effects of chronic malnutrition (associated to higher long term death rates and reduced fertility). History shows that famines "have nearly always been a hallmark of economic backwardness" rather than overpopulation, and Ó Gráda expresses "tempered optimism" that famines will continue a pattern of decline. This persuasive argument for global development is intricate enough to satisfy policy wonks but written with a larger audience in mind.
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