Three Famines

by Tom Keneally, Peter Byrne (Read by)

Overview

This is the story of three terrible famines. The first is an Gorta Mór, the great hunger of Ireland, which began in 1846. The second is the deadly famine that struck Bengal in 1943. The third is the Ethiopian famine, which first sprung up in lethal form in the 1970s under Emperor Haile Selassie and then reappeared under the brutal dictator Mengistu in the 1980s. Keneally visited Eritrea in 1984 to see the effects of this grave event.

Tom Keneally shares these three shocking histories with his customary penetrating wisdom, and he presents a controversial theory in his utterly compelling narrative: in all three famines, ideology, mindsets of governments, racial preconceptions and administrative incompetence were, ultimately, more lethal than the initiating blights, the loss of potatoes or rice or the grain named teff.

‘I am sure Tom Keneally is incapable of writing a dull book’ — Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469218472
Publisher:	Bolinda Audio
Publication date:	09/04/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.12(d)

About the Author

Tom Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 with Schindler’s Ark, later made into the Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg. He has written ten works of non-fiction, including his recent memoir Searching for Schindler. His novels The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gossip From the Forest, and Confederates were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Parclete won the Miles Franklin Award. He lives in Australia.

Editorial Reviews

Eradicating famine from the human condition is one of the most noble goals we can have. But to do this, we need to understand how famine happens—and in the past few decades, this has gone through a revolution, which Keneally's important new book helps explain.
—The New York Times Book Review

Johann Hari

In this vivid but muddled comparative history, novelist and journalist Keneally (Schindler's List) studies three great famines and finds weather, insects, and disease less culpable than misguided, punitive, and sometimes murderous government policies. The Irish potato famine, Keneally argues, was instigated by a fungus, but then compounded by British free market dogmas and trade policies (which he doesn't sufficiently explain), miserly food aid, and the eviction of starving tenants by cruel landlords. He chalks up the Bengal famine of 1943–1944 to British military policies that requisitioned grain and hindered food imports into the Indian province following floods and bad harvests. In his starkest example, he contends that Ethiopian famines of the 1970s and '80s were triggered by drought and worms, but made catastrophic by repression, civil war, and the forcible resettlement of ethnic minorities. Keneally's anecdotal accounts of suffering and misrule are colorful and affecting. Unfortunately, his thematic approach makes a coherent narrative of each famine difficult, and his contentious interpretations lack the requisite scholarly apparatus. (His suggestion that actual dearth of food was a minor factor needs a firmer grounding in statistics.) Keneally's case for famine as a manmade disaster is important, but it deserves a more systematic development. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Booker Prize–winning author Keneally (Searching for Schindler:A Memoir, 2008, etc.) examines causes of deadly famines over the past 150 years, terrible times of starvation when the victims became "members of the nation of the famished, who have more in common with each other than with the cultures starvation steals from them."

The author focuses on three examples—the great hunger that began in Ireland in 1845, the deadly famine in Bengal, India, during World War II and the decimation of Ethiopians in the 1970s and '80s—to argue that while famines may be triggered by natural disasters, in every case their cause is mainly political. They are neither acts of God nor the result of the improvident behavior of the hungry, but are the result of deliberate policies by those in power—made worse by the denial of the democratic right of the victims to voice their protest. Keneally takes particular aim at Malthusian explanations that couple famine with overpopulation. He documents that postponement of marriage limited the size of Irish families, and their heavy reliance on a potato diet had the positive effect of protecting them from vitamin-deficiency diseases such as pellagra and scurvy. Although the failure of the potato crop in Ireland was a precondition for the famine, writes the author, grain and livestock grown in Ireland could have fed people adequately had the British government permitted its domestic distribution instead of insisting that its export to England be continued. A similar situation existed in Bengal when the British diverted rice to the use of the army deployed against the Japanese. In Ethiopia, it was forced collectivization by Marxist leader Mengistu Haile Mariam that fatally disrupted agricultural production. Keneally concludes that the major cause of famine is human agency.

The author provides ample documentation instead of just preaching, but his important message is clear—unless we deal with the real causes of famine, it "has not had its last ride."

Kirkus Reviews