Famine may be triggered by nature but its outcome arises
from politics and ideology. In Three Famines, award-winning
author Thomas Keneally uncovers the troubling truth—that
sustained widespread hunger is historically the outcome of
government neglect and individual venality. Through the lens
of three of the most disastrous famines in modern
history—the potato famine in Ireland, the famine in Bengal
in 1943, and the string of famines that plagued Ethiopia in
the 1970s and 1980s— Keneally shows how ideology, mindsets
of governments, racial preconceptions, and administrative
incompetence were, ultimately, more lethal than the
initiating blights or crop failures.
In this compelling narrative, Keneally recounts the
histories of these events while vividly evoking the terrible
cost of famine at the level of the individual who starves
and the nation that withers.
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