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Three Famines: Starvation and Politics by Thomas Keneally – review. Witnessing famine comes as a visceral shock – the slow and silent evisceration of society, family and the human body itself. The Russian sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, survivor of the famine of the early 1920s in his home country, wrote in Man and Society in Calamity (1946) of starvation reducing man to "a naked animal upon the naked earth". His experience was of a communist famine, in which professors starved alongside peasants. More common is famine that singles out the poor. The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, who lived through the 1943 Bengal famine as a young member of a prominent family that fed the destitute, opened his seminal book Poverty and Famines (1981) with the observation that famine is the phenomenon of some people not having enough food to eat, not of there not being enough food to eat.

Thomas Keneally, the Australian novelist, writes vividly about the depths to which human beings descend during famines. Alex de Waal is the author of Famine Crimes. Free shipping worldwide on all books from The Book Depository. Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Down­load a Free Audio­book from Audi­ble and also AudioBooks.com Down­load hun­dreds of free audio books, most­ly clas­sics, to your MP3 play­er or com­put­er. Below, you’ll find great works of fic­tion, poet­ry and non-fic­tion, by such authors as Twain, Tol­stoy, Hem­ing­way, Orwell, Von­negut, Niet­zsche, Austen, Shake­speare, Asi­mov, HG Wells & more.

Also please see our relat­ed col­lec­tion: The 150 Best Pod­casts to Enrich Your Mind. Fic­tion & Lit­er­a­ture. Browse Inside Switch by Tish Cohen. Untitled.