Three Famines

June 20, 2011
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 1943â1944 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.