YOU DO not expect to find much good news in a book with the words “mass starvation” in the title. Dread feels appropriate, maybe obligatory. But Alex de Waal’s Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine (Polity) makes some encouraging points, and it seems appropriate to start with them, just to deprive pessimism of its home-court advantage.

“At least 100 million people died in great and calamitous famines in the 140 years from 1870 to 2010,” writes de Waal, “and almost all of them died before 1980.” Here the author, who is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and a research professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, employs a couple of ordinary words that have specific meanings within the field of famine research: a “great” famine causes 100,000 “excess” deaths (i.e., beyond the normal mortality rates in a given place and time), while the threshold for “calamitous” is one million dead.

The decades between 1920 and 1950 appear in de Waal’s charts and graphs as mountainous spikes looming over everything else in that 140-year span, never falling below 10 million deaths per decade. Four great or calamitous famines occurred from 1931 to 1940, followed by a staggering leap to 14 during 1941 to 1950.

Inside Higher Ed.