The Last Hunger Season

Author: Roger Thurow
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610393422
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
At 4:00 am, Leonida Wanyama lit a lantern in her house made of sticks and mud. She was up long before the sun to begin her farm work, as usual. But this would be no ordinary day, this second Friday of the new year. This was the day Leonida and a group of smallholder farmers in western Kenya would begin their exodus, as she said, "from misery to Canaan," the land of milk and honey. Africa's smallholder farmers, most of whom are women, know misery. They toil in a time warp, living and working essentially as their forebears did a century ago. With tired seeds, meager soil nutrition, primitive storage facilities, wretched roads, and no capital or credit, they harvest less than one-quarter the yields of Western farmers. The romantic ideal of African farmers -- rural villagers in touch with nature, tending bucolic fields -- is in reality a horror scene of malnourished children, backbreaking manual work, and profound hopelessness. Growing food is their driving preoccupation, and still they don't have enough to feed their families throughout the year. The wanjala -- the annual hunger season that can stretch from one month to as many as eight or nine -- abides. But in January 2011, Leonida and her neighbors came together and took the enormous risk of trying to change their lives. Award-winning author and world hunger activist Roger Thurow spent a year with four of them -- Leonida Wanyama, Rasoa Wasike, Francis Mamati, and Zipporah Biketi -- to intimately chronicle their efforts. In The Last Hunger Season, he illuminates the profound challenges these farmers and their families face, and follows them through the seasons to see whether, with a little bit of help from a new social enterprise organization called One Acre Fund, they might transcend lives of dire poverty and hunger. The daily dramas of the farmers' lives unfold against the backdrop of a looming global challenge: to feed a growing population, world food production must nearly double by 2050. If these farmers succeed, so might we all.

Enough

Author: Roger Thurow
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458767337
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 558

Book Description
For more than thirty years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the ''Green Revolution'' succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year - most of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse. In the west we think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought; or as the legacy of brutal dictators. But in this powerful investigative narrative, Thurow & Kilman show exactly how, in the past few decades, American, British, and European policies conspired to keep Africa hungry and unable to feed itself. As a new generation of activists work to keep famine from spreading, Enough is essential reading on a humanitarian issue of utmost urgency.

40 Chances

Author: Howard G Buffett
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451687869
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
The son of legendary investor Warren Buffet relates how he set out to help nearly a billion individuals who lack basic food security through his passion of farming, in forty stories of lessons learned.

The First 1,000 Days

Author: Roger Thurow
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610395867
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
"Your child can achieve great things." A few years ago, pregnant women in four corners of the world heard those words and hoped they could be true. Among them were Esther Okwir in rural Uganda, where the infant mortality rate is among the highest in the world; Jessica Saldana, a high school student in a violence-scarred Chicago neighborhood; Shyamkali, the mother of four girls in a low-caste village in India; and Maria Estella, in Guatemala's western highlands, where most people are riddled with parasites and moms can rarely afford the fresh vegetables they farm. Greatness? It was an audacious thought, given their circumstances. But they had new cause to be hopeful: they were participating in an unprecedented international initiative designed to transform their lives, the lives of their children, and ultimately the world. The 1,000 Days movement, a response to recent, devastating food crises and new research on the economic and social costs of childhood hunger and stunting, is focused on providing proper nutrition during the first 1,000 days of children's lives, beginning with their mother's pregnancy. Proper nutrition during these days can profoundly influence an individual's ability to grow, learn, and work-and determine a society's long-term health and prosperity. In this inspiring, sometimes heartbreaking book, Roger Thurow takes us into the lives of families on the forefront of the movement to illuminate the science, economics, and politics of malnutrition, charting the exciting progress of this global effort and the formidable challenges it still faces: economic injustice, disease, lack of education and sanitation, misogyny, and corruption.

Sacred Hunger

Author: Barry Unsworth
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307948447
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 647

Book Description
Winner of the Booker Prize A historical novel set in the eighteenth century, Sacred Hunger is a stunning, engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed in the British Empire as it entered fully into the slave trade and spread it throughout its colonies. Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's drastic response provokes a mutiny. Joining together, the sailors and the slaves set up a secret, utopian society in the wilderness of Florida, only to await the vengeance of the single-minded, young Kemp.

Revival Season

Author: Monica West
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982133317
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
The daughter of one of the South’s most famous Baptist preachers discovers a shocking secret about her father that puts her at odds with both her faith and her family in this debut novel. “Spellbinding…Revival Season should be read alongside Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus.” —The Washington Post A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Every summer, fifteen-year-old Miriam Horton and her family pack themselves tight in their old minivan and travel through small southern towns for revival season: the time when Miriam’s father—one of the South’s most famous preachers—holds massive healing services for people desperate to be cured of ailments and disease. But, this summer, the revival season doesn’t go as planned, and after one service in which Reverend Horton’s healing powers are tested like never before, Miriam witnesses a shocking act of violence that shakes her belief in her father—and her faith. When the Hortons return home, Miriam’s confusion only grows as she discovers she might have the power to heal—even though her father and the church have always made it clear that such power is denied to women. Over the course of the following year, Miriam must decide between her faith, her family, and her newfound power that might be able to save others, but if discovered by her father, could destroy Miriam. Celebrating both feminism and faith, Revival Season is a “tender and wise” (Ann Patchett) story of spiritual awakening and disillusionment in a Southern, Black, Evangelical community.

Hunger

Author: Jane Ward
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429982187
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
Anna Rossi grew up in a home where every meal was boiled until the flavor was gone. Now, years later, a gifted cook, she finds her own appetite draining away as her marriage dissolves into blandness. Desperate to hold her lawyer husband's attention for more than five minutes, she convinces him to go on a second honeymoon in New Hampshire - only to find that, in the end, they have nothing left to say to each other. Taking her six-year-old daughter, Sara, Anna begins a new life as a kitchen assistant in a friend's busy ski-area New Hampshire restaurant. With the help of the critical sous chef, James, Anna begins to rediscover the simple pleasures of a life lived on one's own terms - along with the sweetness of fresh blueberry jam, the salty tang of blue cheese, and the warm, comforting and earthy taste of mushrooms. But just as Anna's appetite begins to make a healthy reappearance, a phone call from her less vibrant past forces her to make an important choice. Anna's decision may change the way she has come to view the world, and have devastating effects on the flavor of her future. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The Hunger

Author: Alma Katsu
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593544293
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
"Supernatural suspense at its finest . . . It will scare the pants off you." —The New York Times Book Review Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere. That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos. As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains...and whether the evil that has unfolded around them may have in fact been growing within them all along.

Unstitched

Author: Brett Ann Stanciu
Publisher: Steerforth
ISBN: 1586422707
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Book Description
What if society looked at addiction without judgement? Unstitched shares the powerful story of one librarian’s quest to understand the impact of addiction fed by stigma and inevitable secrecy. The opioid epidemic has hit people in communities large and small and across all socio-economic classes. What should each of us know about it, and do about it? Unstitched moves readers from feelings of helplessness and blame into empathy, ultimately helping friends, family, and community members separate the disease of addiction from the person underneath. A stranger, rumored to be a heroin addict, repeatedly breaks into the small-town library Brett Ann Stanciu runs. After she tries to get law enforcement to take meaningful action against him—elementary school children and young parents with babies frequent the place after all—he dies by suicide. When she realizes how little she knows about opioid misuse, she sets out on a mission, seeking insight from others, such as people in recovery, treatment providers, the town police chief, and Vermont's US attorney. Stanciu’s journey leads to compassionate generosity, renewed faith, and ultimately a measure of personal redemption as she realizes she has a role to play in helping the people of her community stitch themselves back together.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (A Hunger Games Novel)

Author: Suzanne Collins
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 1338635182
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 747

Book Description
Ambition will fuel him. Competition will drive him. But power has its price. It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined - every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute . . . and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.