The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia

Nick Cullather is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University.

The Hungry World furnishes a striking vantage on development policy, as well as on the decidedly mixed outcomes of American engagement with Asian politics. -- Katherine Maher Bookforum 20101201 [This] is an utterly fascinating story--partially about the economics of famine, but mostly about the irrepressible postwar generation who genuinely believed American technology could win the battle for Asian hearts and minds, and stop communism in its tracks. -- Paul Grant Books & Culture 20101228 Brilliant...Admirable...The Hungry World is an immensely important book...[Cullather] has performed a tremendous service, and written a book not just of interest but of lasting value in showing in detail and with great discernment just how new, and also how radical, development was when it first began to transform the ways powerful nations thought about everything from the specifics of warfighting (it is where the "hearts and minds" doctrine was born, after all) to the broadest questions of national interest...If Cullather is right...then his account requires us to rewrite the diplomatic history of the second half of the twentieth century. The Hungry World is the invaluable beginning of that rewriting. -- David Rieff The Nation 20110217 Cullather's book amounts to a thorough, gracefully written debunking of what might be called the green revolution master narrative...Cullather's brilliant, concise early chapter on the Green Revolution's birth in Mexico anchors his broader argument...By the end of the Mexico chapter, Cullather has already shattered the green revolution myth and exposed it as something like a lunge, and a not very well thought-out one, to replace other societies' farming systems with our own highly problematic one. -- Tom Philpott Mother Jones 20110805