A review by eliaszuniga
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis

5.0

An interesting book that makes the argument that famines of the late 19th century in Brazil, India, and China (and perhaps all others) had a social component to them. In essence, people starve each other, not the environment! (As evidence, the author cites plenty of droughts when corresponding famines have not occurred. (Think of our current one in California.)) This amounts to a simple argument: If droughts cause famine, then when droughts happen, famine will occur. But droughts happen without famine. Therefore it is not the case that droughts cause famine. There's also a couple of secondary arguments: a. that so called advancements of Western societies (like technology for example) actually made famines worse. And b. that citing "backwardnes" or overpopulation of those societies for those famines is wrong. The book is difficult to read, for both the gruesome descriptions of brutality, and for tediously detailed information on global weather patterns. For both research and original argument, this book gets an A.