Customer Reviews

Hunger: An Unnatural History

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A wonderfully written, rich, sweeping survey of hunger. many fine stories - some harrowing - finely told and thoughtfully examined. Only a few minor errors - colostrum is thick and yellowy, not thin and blue, for example, and there was little reference to recent work on the speed of metabolic recovery after low-calorie eating. But these should spoil the book for no-one; it was informative, elegant and clever, and I recommend it heartily.

This incredible book covers every aspect of hunger from your rumbling tummy to mass starvation. It includes science, history, anthropology, philosophy, hope and despair; topics such as anorexia nervosa, religious fasting, and hunger studies - both planned and imposed. The phrases grip you; the thoughts connect or clarify. The subject matter is so huge, so important and so well dealt with that I felt at every level that Hunger touches us all.

Most of us have never been hungry, I mean really hungry the way many of the people in this book have been hungry. What Sharman Apt Russell does is show the reader just what it is like in a physical, mental, political and medical way to be hungry, very hungry.

She begins with the so-called "hunger artists" who performed feats of fasting for audiences while sometimes up in cages overlooking traveled boulevards. It seems fasting was a bit of a fad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She mentions literary fasters like the protagonist of Kalka's story "A Hunger Artist" and that of Knut Hamsun's splendid short autobiographical novel Hunger (1890). She also gives us the all-time champ, holder of the record in the Guinness Book of Records (last acknowledged in 1971; Guinness no longer records fasts because of the dangers involved). His name is Mr. A.B. and he weighed 456 pounds when he began. 382 days later he weighed 180 pounds.

Next she shows how our digestive system works and how it changes during food deprivation--what happens after 36 hours, 7 days, 30 days. The details about ghrelin and leptin, glucose and ketones are fascinating. Then she recalls famous hunger strikes including some very interesting material on the suffragettes, the Irish Republicans and Mahatma Gandhi. Then comes the horror of the Warsaw Ghetto and, amazingly enough, the work of Jewish doctors in the ghetto who took that gruesome opportunity to measure and study the steps toward death by starvation.

Russell reports on "The Minnesota Experiment" during World War II in which young male conscientious objectors volunteered to go on an extended starvation diet so that doctors would know how to treat those in Europe and elsewhere after the war was over. After awhile these healthy young men cared nothing about sex or social activities. All they thought about was food. The academically inclined turned from scholarly books to cookbooks and found that the only conversations that interested them were about food, food, food. This reminds me of some of the episodes of TV's "Survivor."

In "The Anthropology of Hunger" (Chapter 9) Russell explores "hunger frustration" among some tribes in Africa and Papua New Guinea. People tend to get a little testy when they don't have enough to eat, and when they have a culture that admires thinness and detests gluttony, they tend to eat on the sly, as do the Kalauna of Papua New Guinea. In this chapter Russell revisits anthropologist Colin Turnbull's famous book The Mountain People (1972) about the Ik people of Uganda who seemed to lack in common human decency. She argues that it was semi-starvation that drove the psychology of these people, and that Turnbull failed to adequately appreciate this.

There is a chapter on "Anorexia nervosa" and attendant psychology, Karen Carpenter and the distorted body images of adolescent girls.

And then come the chapters entitled, "Hungry Children" and the "Protocols of Famine." Now it really gets ugly, and the pages no longer turn themselves. The technical words become "dysentery" and "cholera" and "marasmus" and "kwashiorkor," words that describe starvation in children. Now the book is hard to read: Somalia, Ethiopia, the Sudan, famine all over the world, in China under Mao 1959-1962, in Guatemala under the military backed by the US, in short the words are about the geopolitics of hunger.

Russell ends with a chapter on the potato famine in Ireland in 1845-50 and how that too was as much the result of political failure as it was the result of the potato blight. Her last words are about St. Patrick who went on a hunger strike against God, "a troscad until death."

In marvelously non-technical fashion, Russell describes the biology of hunger: what happens to your body as you go eighteen hours, thirty-six hours, and thirty days without food. She shows how hunger strikes have changed the world (from Gandhi's non-violent strikes to the Irish Republican Army and British suffragettes), the role of fasting in myriad religious traditions, how hunger has defined certain traditional cultures, and even how hunger has been used as entertainment.

Some chapters illuminate fascinating chapters in the history of hunger. "The Hunger Disease Studies" narrates how internationally renowned Jewish scientists in the Warsaw Ghetto used the omnipresent starvation to perform scientific studies on every aspect of starvation, searching for meaning in terrible suffering. "The Minnesota Experiment" describes an enlightening study of starvation and refeeding during World War II. Russell casts her net wide, examining the social and biological aspects of anorexia, giving an inside view to famine relief in Somalia and Ethiopia, and showing how hunger affects children distinctly.

Russell's skilled prose makes even the World Health Organization's technical instructions on refeeding a malnourished child interesting. She reminds us that science is a kind of poetry. As with all the best non-fiction, her endnotes offer a wealth of fascinating literature on every aspect of hunger, a literature I'll be sure to dive into. As another reviewer wrote, Russell's writing "is an extraordinary mating of exciting, sure-footed science and inspired prose poetry" (Burlington Free Press, 10 August 2003).

Every day we wake up hungry and break a potential fast: but few have had the experience of real hunger. HUNGER takes a day-by-day tour of body and mind sans food, from Day 1 to a week or more without food. History, culture, and health concerns blend in a wide-ranging analysis of the different experiences of and influences on hunger, how it works physiologically, and more. A top pick not just for college collections, but for public libraries and general-interest readers.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor

California Bookwatch

This book kept my interest from beginning to end. Among other things, she talks about the difference between fasting and starvation, the religious tradition of fasting (periodically for some, supposedly constantly for a few "saints"), anorexia, and the results of constant hunger on people's minds, bodies, and especially behavior, whether they're volunteer experiments or real people in poor societies who are slowly starving to death. The latter stories, as well as information about famines in China, Ireland, and elsewhere, are sobering and sad. Naturally, these experiences are in such stark contrast to how most of we overfed Americans live, and I kept thinking of some of the constant exhortations you find in diet books like "never skip breakfast" or "don't eat foods such as carrots or potatoes because you'll gain weight more easily, eat low carb only." This book was a good reality check about that sort of advice. On an optimistic note, Ms. Russell also talks about the efforts of Dr. Steven Collins and others to help provide portable, nutrient rich foods to starving people, and that chapter ends very hopefully. I highly recommend this book.

Great introductory book that opens your eyes to the misfortune of many who have, do and will suffer from voluntary and involuntary hunger. The author's ideas and thoughts are backed up with science, yet the book is an easy read for the layperson. If this book really grabs your attention, the author cites a wealth of sources to learn more about hunger. Highly recommend this book!

Ms. Russell's insistent, inviting prose weaves word images so accurate and compelling that I as the reader sensorally experience the vast aspects of hunger. I was awed in the first chapter by her introduction to hunger as a scientific experience and an emotional one. I eagerly read forward, feeding on her delicious and expert language. Then as the book progressed through an understanding of our body's uses for the food we eat to the historical/anthropological events of hunger into the unavoidable role hunger is playing in the NOW of our world, I changed from a passive connoisseur to a most dedicated activist for a cause. Hunger by choice is one thing, I learned, but forced, unavoidable starvation and death is a travesty we human beings MUST, and as Ms. Russell enthusiastically suggests, CAN eleviate. Her pictures of children, starving, starving unnecessarily, shook me out of my comfortable chair. Millenium Goals #1: halve the world hunger by 2015. Let's do it, I respond. Thank you Ms. Russell for writing a book that challenges us to be more than we imagined we could be: an army of food bearers? Yes that's sounds right.

simply one of the best books i've ever read. i approached it with some trepidation but by the second or third page became so absorbed i could hardly put it down.

Hunger, as a topic, is multifaceted.

- There is the physiology, neurobiology, and biochemistry around appetite, satiety, digestion, metabolism, hunger, and starvation.

- There is the use of hunger and starvation as weapons against others, and as symbols of empowerment.

- There is the utility, practicality, and morality of developing and implementing local and global anti-hunger programs.

- Hunger is linked with piety on the one hand, and evil on the other.

And while hundreds of millions of people go to bed hungry every night, I read yesterday (Meat: A Benign Extravagance that one survey indicated about 45% of the edible, prepared food in the U.S. is trashed every day. Go figure.

Author Sharman Apt Russell takes the reader through the body as a person wakes up in the morning. At this time, most of us have undergone a fast of 10-12 hours (no food since dinner the night before). How is the body responding to this fast, and how do we respond behaviorally?

What happens when this fast is extended for 24 hours, then 3 days, then a week? What happens to the mind and the body when the fast extends for 40 days?

And the body responds to a fast (no carbs, protein, or fats, but water okay) in one way, but to hunger in another. As I understand it, we "adjust" to no food easier than we do to "some" food. Fasters soon reach a state of... calmness? euphoria? peace? But those who are hungry, consuming some nutrients but clearly not enough, suffer continuously. We know this through some experimental work with volunteers (the Minnesota Experiment), but also with the grisly monitoring of starved people during war and famine. And the process of rehabilitating starved people is much more complicated than simply giving them more food.

Russell referenced some records made during the WWII-era Dutch Hunger Winter about the result of starvation on children born during periods of hunger. I wonder if she looked at another natural experiment, when women suffer from clotted placentas, thus reducing the amount of nutrients available to their unborn babies. Why is this important? "When an adult is hungry, it happens in the present tense. When a child starves, there is another dimension. It also happens in the future. For a child is potential, in the act of becoming" (p. 180)... "It will change who he or she is in the world" (p. 182).

Russell's writing is crisp and well-reasoned. I look forward to reading other books by this author, who seems to have a very wide range of interests.