With access to food seeming unlimited – cafes line the streets, food programs dominate television time and obesity is becoming a major health problem – it is particularly sobering to read of periods when starvation caused the deaths of millions of people. Here, the prolific Tom Keneally lucidly details the catastrophic famines that occurred in Ireland in the late 1840s, Bengal in 1943–44 and Ethiopia in the 1970s and ’80s.

As Keneally makes clear, famines are caused not just by food shortages, but also by distant, oppressive and sometimes tyrannical regimes. Potato blight devastated Ireland and the failure of rice crops in Bengal and teff in Ethiopia were key triggers for famine, but so too were the responses of the British in Ireland and Bengal, and the Selassie and Mengistu regimes in Ethiopia. Keneally sketches the key actors in each case – villains, whose actions prolonged the suffering; heroes, who attempted to alleviate it; whistleblowers, who drew attention to the role of government in exacerbating it – and outlines the widespread diseases, eviction and emigration that resulted in each case.

Keneally is strongest on the Irish situation, which he has written about before in The Great Shame; there, as he says, he was exploring it from the perspective of Irish nationalism, here he attempts to discuss it as an event that ‘echoed and illustrated other famines’. This synthesis is not always entirely smooth. His descriptions of the Ethiopian situation, which he witnessed first-hand in the 1980s, are effective, but that of Bengal remains shadowy – he calls it a ‘hidden’ famine, though more deadly than even the Irish, and it largely stays that way. What he does do convincingly is show that famine, of which these are only three among several instances in recent history, involves breakdowns in democracy and human rights as much as food supply. Current Western abundance is no excuse for ignoring the possibilities of such events in the future.