Famine may be triggered by nature but its outcome arises from politics and ideology In Three Famines awardwinning author Thomas Keneally uncovers the troubling truththat 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 historythe potato famine in Ireland the famine in Bengal inand the string of famines that plagued Ethiopia in the s and sKeneally 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