History of hunger will fill readers

The haunting images of starving children appear regularly on television, sometimes on the news, sometimes in heart-moving appeals for charity. Usually, the hunger is in some faraway land.

Hunger, however, can be anywhere, anytime. It can be the result of poverty or of protest. It can be the result of mistaken or evil politics. It can be the result of religious belief.

In a country where cookbooks sell by the millions, a book about hunger might seem out of place. But Sharman Apt Russell gives it a place with Hunger: An Unnatural History, introducing the causes, people and reasons for hunger, and detailing its effects on individuals.

From "hunger artists," who seek attention by fasting, to victims of the Nazis in Belgium and Poland who were denied food because of their resistance, Ms. Russell's volume is a revelation in human life.

She details the physical and psychological effects of hunger, learned by studying starvation victims in World War II and those in the U.S. hunger experiment at the end of the war, when volunteers went hungry so physicians could study what happened to them and learn to treat others.

She notes that scientists are beginning to say that a little hunger might be good for us, that fewer calories can contribute to longer life. A weight-loss book this is not, however.

"Not eating seems to be innately religious," Ms. Russell observes. "Physical hunger is too good a metaphor for spiritual hunger and to fast is to proclaim your hunger for what is not physical - for the divine."

She reports that all the major religions incorporate fasting in some way or other, from Evangelicals fasting for revival to Muslims during Ramadan to Catholics on Ash Wednesday, Jews on Yom Kippur and Hindus on certain festival days.

"The Buddha rejected hunger as a means to inner peace but the religion that bears his name does not," she writes.

"Hunger is a form of communication," Ms. Russell tells us. "When we fast for health, we are having a conversation with the body. When we fast as a Jew or Catholic or Muslim or Hindu, we are having a conversation with God. These are private discussions and often silent."

Hunger strikes are not silent, having become a widely used form of protest. Fasting as protest has been known since medieval times. Women suffragists in England used the hunger strike effectively.

One hunger striker for Irish independence - who eventually died of hunger - wrote: "It is not those who inflict the most but those who will suffer the most who will conquer."

In the end, he was right.