Three Famines cover art

Three Famines

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Three Famines

By: Thomas Keneally
Narrated by: Peter Byrne
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £18.99

Buy Now for £18.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

This is the story of three terrible famines. The first is an Gorta Mór, the great hunger of Ireland, which began in 1846. The second is the deadly famine that struck Bengal in 1943. The third is the Ethiopian famine, which first sprung up in lethal form in the 1970s under Emperor Haile Selassie and then reappeared under the brutal dictator Mengistu in the 1980s. Keneally visited Eritrea in 1984 to see the effects of this grave event. Tom Keneally shares these three shocking histories with his customary penetrating wisdom, and he presents a controversial theory in his utterly compelling narrative: in all three famines, ideology, mindsets of governments, racial preconceptions and administrative incompetence were, ultimately, more lethal than the initiating blights, the loss of potatoes or rice or the grain named teff.

©2010 Copyright © The Serpentine Publishing Co. (Pty) Limited 2010. (P)2011 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd Africa Asia Disaster Relief Europe India Political Science Politics & Government Social Sciences South Asia World Famine Ireland

Listeners also enjoyed...

 1493 for Young People cover art

Critic reviews

‘A powerful non-fiction work that reminds us that hunger has been – and remains – among the greatest of the world’s injustices.’ Stephen Romei, The Australian
‘I am sure Tom Keneally is incapable of writing a dull book’ — Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald
Most relevant
Famine is something we should all be much more aware of and this book explains in detail 3 particular famines, the Irish potato famine, the Bengal famine during WW2 and the famines in Ethiopa and NE Africa of the late 20th century. Author covers medical, agricultural and political aspects of each famine and highlights common failings that lead to each disaster and which failed to relieve them. An important and well presented book.

Important account of a terrible subject

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Sounds like a software programme has been used to narrate this - the voice is robotic and the pronunciation are comically awful. It's impossible to listen to, even for research reasons. An excellent book made unlistenable, I feel ripped off - does no-one actually check the narration quality before acceptance?

Sounds like a computer reader

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.