Hunger: An Unnatural History

by Sharman Apt Russell

Overview

Every day, we wake up hungry. Every day, we break our fast. Hunger explores the range of this primal experience. Sharman Apt Russell, the highly acclaimed author of Anatomy of a Rose and An Obsession with Butterflies, here takes us on a tour of hunger, from eighteen hours without food to thirty-six hours to seven days and beyond. What Russell finds-both in our bodies and in cultures around the world-is extraordinary. It is a biological process that transcends nature to shape the very of fabric of societies. In a fascinating survey of centuries of thought on hunger's unique power, she discovers an ability to adapt to it that is nothing short of miraculous. From the fasting saints of the early Christian church to activists like Mahatma Gandhi, generations have used hunger to make spiritual and political statements. Russell highlights these remarkable cases where hunger can inspire and even heal, but she also addresses the devastating impact of starvation on cultures around the world today. Written with consummate skill, a compassionate heart, and stocked with facts, figures, and fascinating lore, Hunger is an inspiring window on history and the human spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465071654
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	09/05/2006
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sharman Apt Russell is the author of several books, including Hunger and Songs of the Fluteplayer, which won the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. She has written for publications including Discover and Nature Conservancy, and currently contributes to OnEarth, the magazine for the National Resource Defense Council. Russell teaches creative writing at Western New Mexico University and at Antioch University in Los Angeles, California. She lives in Silver City, New Mexico.

Table of Contents

1	The Hunger Artists	1
	We have always been hungry
	Hunger artists
	The portrait of the artist as a hungry young man
	Famine and the gates of grief
	Calorie restriction and fasting for health
	The intimacy of hunger
2	Eighteen Hours	17
	The process of digestion
	Signals of satiety
	Our "second brain"
	Ghrelin and leptin
	The transformation of the world
	Appetite and aversion
	Skipping breakfast
3	Thirty-Six Hours	27
	Gender differences and short-term hunger
	Our savings bank of calories
	A shortage of glucose
	Obesity research
	Genetic disorders of overeating
	Obesity and poverty
	Poverty and hunger
4	Seven Days	37
	Seventy-two hours without food
	The liver
	The magic of ketones, the miracle of ketosis
	Fasting in religion
	Fasting saints and miracle maids
	A renaissance of Christian fasting
	My fast
	The seven-day fast, matching Heaven with Heaven
5	Thirty Days	53
	Tanner's "starvation comedy"
	The first scientific study of a thirty-day fast
	A cure for obesity
	Fasting for health
	A therapeutic fasting center
	Calorie restriction in monkeys and Biospherians
	Hormesis and intermittent fasting
6	The Hunger Strike	73
	Hunger as theatre
	The English suffragettes revive an old tradition
	Mahatma Gandhi
	Ten Irish Republicans
	Medical ethics in a hunger strike
7	The Hunger Disease Studies	95
	The Warsaw Ghetto
	An ambitious research project
	Results of the hunger disease studies
	The first general conference on hunger disease
	Deportations and liquidation
	The fate of the scientists
8	The Minnesota Experiment	113
	Hungry people and the end of World War II
	The use of conscientious objectors in the Minnesota Experiment
	The physical and psychological effects of semi-starvation
	Unexpected problems in refeeding
	Consequences of the experiment
9	The Anthropology of Hunger	137
	Hunger frustration in the Siriono of Bolivia, Gurage of Ethiopia, and Kalauna of Papua New Guinea
	Colin Turnbull and the African Ik, the dissolution of family
	Three social responses to widespread hunger
	Cannibalism
	The largest recorded famine in history
	Hunger and child death in the cane workers of Brazil
	The medicalization of hunger
10	Anorexia Nervosa	157
	Anorexia mirabilis, anorexia nervosa
	The involuntary effects of starvation
	Similarities and differences between anorectics and the Minnesota Experiment volunteers
	Anorexia nervosa as adaptation
	Multiple theories
11	Hungry Children	169
	The Dutch Hunger Winter
	Starvation and fetal development
	Marasmus and kwashiorkor
	The debate over protein and micronutrients
	New ways to refeed malnourished children
	Children as the icon of famine
	How hunger affects cognition and growth
	How to help a hungry child
12	Protocols of Famine	187
	Baidoa, Somalia
	New ways to refeed malnourished adults
	The will to live
	Vonzula, Liberia
	Famine and disease
	Wau, Sudan
	Triage
	Home-based care and therapeutic feeding centers
	Ready-to-eat therapeutic food
	Pilot programs
13	An and To Hunger	205
	Social causes of hunger
	Epiphany
	The United Nations Hunger Task Force and the eight Millennium Development Goals
	The facts of world hunger
	Three strategies to end world hunger
14	The Top of the Mountain	215
	Hunger and Saint Patrick
	Legal and moral uses of fasting in early Ireland
	A walk up Croagh Patrick
	Irish history
	An Gorta Mor of 1845-50
	Ancient troscad and the power of hunger
	Selected References and Notes	231
	Acknowledgements	261

Editorial Reviews

An engrossing account of the myriad aspects of hunger, from its psychological and physical effects on the body to the spiritual, therapeutic and political motivations for fasting. Russell (Writing/ Western New Mexico University), author of The Anatomy of a Rose (2001) and other books on natural history, undertaken a period of fasting to learn firsthand what real hunger feels like. Hunger, she reports, is as big as history and as intimate as the self. Besides providing disturbing statistics on hunger and riveting accounts of famines, she explores the physiology of digestion and the mystery of anorexia nervosa, delves into the curious practice of competitive fasting and reports on the use of hunger strikes by Gandhi, English suffragettes and Irish Republicans. Perhaps the most fascinating sections of her book are her accounts of hunger studies. One amazing study was conducted by Jewish doctors trapped inside the Warsaw ghetto in World War II, when official Nazi policy was starvation of the Jews. The results of the project, which ended in 1943 when the inhabitants were liquidated and the ghetto razed, were smuggled out to aryan doctors, published in French in 1946 and remain today the most detailed portrait of extreme starvation. Another study conducted in 1944 and 1945 in Minnesota used conscientious objectors as medical guinea pigs, putting young men on a semi-starvation diet for six months and then refeeding them in order to determine the most effective and economical way to help starving populations at the war's end. Also noteworthy are descriptions of how hunger shapes human culture. Here, Russell turns to the work of anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who studied the starving Ik people ofUganda and Kenya in the 1960s and created a chilling portrait of human behavior under the stress of chronic hunger. Following her account of relief efforts around the globe, her penultimate chapter includes the recommendations of the U.N. Task ForceAgainst Hunger for reducing hunger in the world. While the subject is often somber, the presentation is one of verve and style-and the end-of-book notes provide a useful guide for readers whose interest has been piqued.

Kirkus Reviews