Books & Media Reviews

Regenerative Agriculture to Mitigate Hunger: Thurow’s Latest Book
Book Review: Roger Thurow’s Against the Grain: How Farmers Around the Globe are Transforming Agriculture to Nourish the World and Health the Planet (2024, Publisher: Agate Surrey) American journalist, Roger Thurow, has written consistently about global hunger...

Film Mischaracterizes Humanitarian Aid Work
[Editor's note: The following opinion piece was written by career aid worker Amy Leah Potter in response to the recent release of the film "Dirty Angels" which has upset many people in the aid community for its depiction of humanitarian NGOs serving as shells to hide army combatants. The mov...

Why Nations Fail, Famine and the Nobel Prize
The 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded in October to the authors Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in part for the analysis of international inequalities in their best-selling 2012 book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (Crown Publishers), which arr...

Stalled Progress Against Hunger for Third Consecutive Year
For the third year in a row, global hunger remains persistently high after the increase during and because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The United Nations’...

Book Classic: Famine, Conflict and Response by Fred Cuny
Book Classic: Famine, Conflict and Response: a Basic Guide By Fred Cuny, with Rick Hill (West Hartford, CN: Kumarian Press 1999) This basic, extremely readable text about famine prevention and relief remains a preferred textb...

BOOK REVIEW: The Enduring Struggle: The History of the U.S. Agency for International Development and America’s Uneasy Transformation of the World
BOOK REVIEW: The Enduring Struggle: The History of the U.S. Agency for International Development and America’s Uneasy Transformation of the World, by John Norris. 2021. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher. America's primary international assista...

The Razor’s Edge: Embezzlement, Corruption and Development in Ethiopia, a Novel (2022)
For anyone interested in learning what development work overseas entails and what work is like, there may be no better introduction than Robert Gurevich’s novel, The Razor’s Edge. Thinly modeled on his own experiences in Africa, with his protagonist, writing in the first person...

“Love and Liberation” Captures Voices of Local Aid Workers in Famine Zone
Lauren Carruth's important 2021 book, Love and Liberation - Humanitarian Work in Ethiopia's Somali Region (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) fills a gap in the literature about aid programs by listening to the perspectives of those personnel delivering aid o...

Resilience Book Review: Ending Hunger – The Quest to Feed the World without Destroying It
Anthony Warner's 2022 book "Ending Hunger - the Quest to Feed the World Without Destroying it" (Oneworld Press) attempts to challenge the myths he sees in social discourse in developed countries about how to address world food problems. Based on his popular blog "the Angr...

Documentary Looks Back at Norman Borlaug’s Career
A recent documentary available from the Public Broadcast System (PBS) and WGBH "The Man Who Tried to Feed the World" (2020) briefly surveys the motivations and achievem...