12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Medical tag
Starvation Nutrition
Hunger, famine, malnutrition, diet as medicine.
Works
A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
A Little Princess opens on a foggy London day as seven-year-old Sara Crewe rides in a cab with her adoring father, Captain Ralph Crewe, a young officer who has brought her from India to Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies. Because her father is rich, Sara is given a private sitting room, a French maid, a pony and a doll named Emily whom she half believes can walk and talk when no one is looking.
A Modest Proposal is Swift's savage 1729 pamphlet on Irish poverty under British rule, written in the voice of a projector who treats hunger, tenancy, children, and mothers as items in a national account. The speaker begins with beggars and starving children in Dublin streets, then adopts the language of calculation: numbers of infants, costs of nursing, market value, culinary uses, and benefits to landlords.
A Tale of Two Cities moves between London and Paris from 1775 to the Reign of Terror in 1793-94. In Book the First, Recalled to Life, Jarvis Lorry, a clerk of Tellson's Bank, travels by the Dover mail and sends back the cryptic message Recalled to life by the porter Jerry Cruncher.
Al-Razi's treatise, known in Arabic as Kitab al-Judari wa al-Hasba (The Book of Smallpox and Measles), is a short practical monograph in fourteen chapters by the leading physician of the Abbasid world. It is usually described as the earliest surviving work devoted to these diseases and the first to set out clearly how to tell them apart at the bedside.
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys is Nathaniel Hawthorne's first book of Greek myths retold for children. Six stories are set inside a frame: Eustace Bright, an eighteen-year-old Williams College student on vacation, tells them to a crowd of children staying at Tanglewood, a country house in the Berkshires, whom Hawthorne gives flower and plant names such as Primrose, Periwinkle, Sweet Fern, Dandelion, Squash-Blossom and Buttercup.
Aesop's Fables are short animal tales that turn ordinary encounters—a wolf and a lamb, a lion and a mouse, ants and a grasshopper—into clear morals about justice, prudence, gratitude, and folly. The Greek slave Aesop is the traditional name attached to a body of stories that circulated orally and in later collections; what survives for English readers is a tradition of brief narratives ending in a pointed lesson.
Paul Bäumer, a young German infantryman not yet twenty, tells in the present tense of his last two years in the Great War. He and his classmates Albert Kropp, Müller and Leer enlisted together, urged on by their schoolmaster Kantorek, and now serve in a company that has just come out of the line with eighty men left of a hundred and fifty.
Animal Farm is a short beast fable about a revolution that turns into a tyranny. On Manor Farm near Willingdon in England, the old prize boar Major gathers the animals one night and describes a dream of a world without Man, who takes their milk, eggs and labour and sends them to the knacker when they are old.
Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England was published in London in November 1644, deliberately without a licence, a printer's name or registration with the Stationers' Company. It is written as an oration addressed to the Lords and Commons, though it was never delivered.
As You Like It begins with two households divided by envy. Orlando, youngest son of the late Sir Rowland de Boys, complains to the old servant Adam that his elder brother Oliver keeps him like a peasant and denies him the education his father willed him.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
Centesimus Annus marks the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and reads the social question through the upheavals of the twentieth century. John Paul II returns first to 1891: industrial labor, socialist agitation, private property, wages, association, and the rights of workers.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
Cyrano de Bergerac is Edmond Rostand's five-act verse play about a seventeenth-century Gascon soldier, poet and swordsman whose enormous nose convinces him that no woman could love him. Act I opens in 1640 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre in Paris.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Death Comes for the Archbishop follows Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant, French missionary priests sent to the newly annexed American Southwest to organize the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Cather shapes the novel less as a conventional plot than as a sequence of remembered journeys, encounters, hardships, and acts of pastoral administration.
The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's answer to a prize question set by the Academy of Dijon in 1753: what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law? Rousseau's essay did not win the prize, but it was printed at Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey in 1755 with a dedication to the Republic of Geneva, a preface and extensive notes.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers gathers short texts from Christianity’s formative generations after the apostles. The collection usually includes 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Clement and fragments such as Papias or the Epistle to Diognetus, depending on edition.
This selection gathers fourteen of Hans Christian Andersen's most loved fairy tales, written between 1835 and 1845, in the English versions revised and partly newly translated by the Scottish scholar W. A. Craigie for Oxford University Press in 1914. In The Tinder-Box a returning soldier fetches a magic tinder-box from a hollow tree for a witch, keeps it, and with the help of three dogs with enormous eyes wins a princess and a kingdom.
Farmer Boy tells about a year and more in the boyhood of Almanzo Wilder, the author's future husband, on his family's prosperous farm near Malone in northern New York in the 1860s. Almanzo is almost nine when the book opens in January, walking to the schoolhouse with his brother Royal and his sisters Eliza Jane and Alice.
Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane, with their baby brother the Lamb, have come from two years in Camden Town to a white house in the Kent countryside near Rochester, between a chalk-quarry and a gravel-pit. Their father is called away on business and their mother goes to nurse their sick grandmother, leaving them in the care of the nursemaid Martha and the other servants.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
Heidi, in Elisabeth P. Stork’s public-domain English translation, tells of a small orphan brought to live with her reclusive Alm-Uncle high in the Swiss Alps, then carried away to Frankfurt’s closed rooms before homesickness and providence return her to mountain air, goats, and fir trees. Johanna Spyri’s novel joins outdoor joy to serious care for the sick, the lonely, and the hard-hearted.
The first two books of Procopius's History of the Wars tell the long contest between the Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, and Sasanian Persia, from the early fifth century to 549. Procopius opens by declaring that he writes so that great deeds will not be lost, that he was an eyewitness as adviser to Belisarius, and that truth alone suits history.
Household Stories is Lucy Crane's English translation of fifty-two tales chosen from the Brothers Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen, first published in London by Macmillan in 1882 with pictures by her brother Walter Crane; the library text follows a later reprint and omits the illustrations. The selection mixes the most famous wonder tales with comic stories, animal fables and short nursery pieces.
I Will Fight No More Forever is the message of surrender that Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce sent to General Oliver O. Howard and Colonel Nelson A. Miles on 5 October 1877, at the end of the siege at the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana Territory. Since June the non-treaty Nez Perce bands, some 750 people including many women, children, and elderly, had retreated more than a thousand miles from Idaho, through the Bitterroot Mountains, across Yellowstone, and north toward refuge in Canada, fighting a series of engagements with the army along the way.
Frederick wrote the treatise known in English as Instructions for His Generals in the winter of 1746–1747, after the first two Silesian Wars had won and held the rich Austrian province of Silesia. Its French title was Les Principes généraux de la guerre; a German version, Die General-Principia vom Kriege, was printed in 1748 in a small number of copies for Prussian generals, who were bound to keep it secret.
Jane Eyre is the life story, told by Jane herself, of an orphan girl who grows into a governess and finally a wife, keeping her conscience and her self-respect through poverty, temptation and grief. At ten Jane lives at Gateshead Hall with her aunt by marriage, Mrs. Reed, who resents her, and her bullying cousin John.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie is a short easy-reader history book about Abbie Burgess, the teenage daughter of the lighthouse keeper on Matinicus Rock, a bare island far out in the sea off the coast of Maine. In January 1856 Abbie's mother is sick, the family is running low on food and on oil for the lamps, and Captain Burgess must sail his small boat to the mainland town of Rockland for supplies and medicine.
Kidnapped is narrated by David Balfour, a seventeen-year-old Lowland Scot who in June 1751, after his father's death, leaves the village of Essendean with a letter for the House of Shaws. The minister Mr. Campbell sends him off with a shilling, a Bible and a handwritten recipe for lily-of-the-valley water, and with the news that he is a Balfour of Shaws.
Lassie Come-Home is the story of a tricolour collie who crosses hundreds of miles of Scottish and English country to return to the boy she loves. In the Yorkshire mining village of Greenall Bridge, Lassie belongs to Sam Carraclough, and every man in the village agrees she is the finest collie he has ever seen.
Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them.
Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items.
Sulpitius Severus's Life of St. Martin made Martin of Tours one of the defining saints of the Latin West. The narrative begins with Martin's birth in Pannonia, upbringing in Italy, and reluctant military service.
Lord of the Flies follows a party of British schoolboys, aged roughly six to twelve, whose aeroplane is shot down over a tropical island during an unnamed atomic war. No adult survives.
Man's Search for Meaning has two parts. The first, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, is not a chronicle of atrocities but a psychiatrist's account of how ordinary prisoners lived, suffered and either kept or lost their inner hold on life.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
Mother Courage and Her Children follows Anna Fierling, a canteen woman nicknamed Mother Courage, who hauls her covered wagon behind the armies of the Thirty Years' War selling food, drink, boots and belts to soldiers. The play covers twelve years, from 1624 to 1636, in twelve scenes, each introduced by a written caption that tells the audience in advance what will happen.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
My Side of the Mountain is the first-person record of Sam Gribley, a boy of about twelve who leaves his family's crowded New York City apartment to live alone for a year in the Catskill Mountains. Sam had told his father he meant to go to the old Gribley farm, land his great-grandfather once worked near the town of Delhi, and his father laughed and let him try, sure he would be back by morning.
Napoleon's Maxims of War is not a book Napoleon wrote but a compilation made by a French officer, General Burnod, who in 1827 published Maximes de guerre de Napoléon, drawn from the emperor's memoirs dictated on St Helena and other sources. The British officer George Charles D'Aguilar translated it into English in 1831, adding explanatory notes with examples from the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Montecuccoli, Frederick the Great and Napoleon himself.
This Douglass entry pairs the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with the 1852 speech commonly known as What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? The Narrative tells Douglass's movement from enslaved childhood in Maryland through violence, literacy, skilled labor, resistance, escape, and public abolitionist identity.
Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, follows an orphan from a workhouse cradle to a safe home, passing on the way through the criminal underworld of 1830s London. Oliver is born in a workhouse in an unnamed town; his mother dies within minutes, leaving only a locket and a ring that later prove who she was.
On War (Vom Kriege) is an unfinished philosophical inquiry into the nature of war, written by a Prussian staff officer who had lived through the Napoleonic transformation of warfare. It is organised in eight books, but Clausewitz left a note in 1827 saying that only the first chapter of Book I satisfied him, and he was revising the whole when he died.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich follows a single winter day, from reveille at five in the morning to lights-out, in a Soviet special labour camp on the steppe of Kazakhstan in the early 1950s. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a peasant from the village of Temgenyovo, was captured by the Germans in 1942, escaped back to his own lines, and was charged with treason as a supposed German spy; he signed a confession because refusing meant being shot.
Principles of Geology is Charles Lyell's argument that the earth's past can be explained by the same causes that are acting on it now, working at their present intensity over immense periods of time. The first edition appeared in three volumes in 1830, 1832 and 1833, under a subtitle describing it as an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation.
Rerum Novarum, issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891 and addressed to the bishops of the Catholic world, takes its Latin title from its opening words about the spirit of revolutionary change. Its English title is On the Condition of the Working Classes.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
Tanglewood Tales is Nathaniel Hawthorne's second book of Greek myths retold for children, a sequel to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. In a short introduction called The Wayside, Hawthorne pretends that the stories were written by his young friend Eustace Bright, a Williams College student who had told the first set to a group of children at Tanglewood in the Berkshires; Eustace visits Hawthorne's snowy Concord hillside with six new stories, and Hawthorne agrees to act as editor.
In a Tuscan village the carpenter Mastro Cherry finds a log that cries out when he strikes it, and gladly hands it to his poor friend Geppetto, who carves it into a marionette and names him Pinocchio. The puppet runs off before his feet are finished, gets Geppetto taken to jail, and kills the Talking Cricket with a hammer when it warns him that disobedient boys come to grief.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal. Tom is an orphan living with his kind, anxious Aunt Polly, his priggish half-brother Sid and his cousin Mary.
The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech.
The Argonautica is the one full Greek epic of the voyage of the Argo that survives from antiquity, composed in four books of dactylic hexameter by the Alexandrian scholar-poet Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC. King Pelias of Iolcus, warned by an oracle to beware a man wearing one sandal, sees Jason arrive having lost a sandal in the river Anaurus, and sends him to fetch the golden fleece from Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea.
The Art of the Commonplace gathers Wendell Berry's agrarian essays on land, household, work, food, technology, economy, conservation, and the moral scale of community. The collection's title points to Berry's method: he resists abstraction by returning arguments to farms, watersheds, kitchens, tools, soil, neighbors, and inherited obligations.
Dell'arte della guerra, printed in Florence in 1521, is the only one of Machiavelli's political works published in his lifetime. It is a dialogue in seven books, set in 1516 in the Orti Oricellari, the shaded garden of Cosimo Rucellai, where the humanist circle that Machiavelli frequented met to discuss Livy and republican government.
The Arthashastra, the 'science of material gain' or of statecraft, is a vast Sanskrit treatise on how a king should acquire, protect and govern territory. Written mostly in prose with occasional verses, it is divided into fifteen books and some 150 chapters, and covers almost every aspect of administration with remarkable detail and an unsentimental realism that has led to comparisons with Machiavelli.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Call of the Wild follows Buck, a huge St. Bernard and Scotch shepherd cross, through one terrible and transforming year of the Klondike gold rush. Buck lives as the lord of Judge Miller's estate in the Santa Clara Valley of California until Manuel, a gardener's helper who needs money for his lottery gambling, sells him to dog traders.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Commonwealth of Oceana, published in London in 1656 during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, is a model constitution for a republic set in an island called Oceana, which is England under a thin disguise. Scotland is Marpesia, Ireland Panopea, London Emporium, and Cromwell himself appears as Olphaus Megaletor, the Lord Archon or sole legislator who founds the commonwealth and then gives up his power.
The Communist Manifesto presents modern history as the history of class struggle and casts the bourgeoisie as both revolutionary and exploitative. Marx and Engels argue that capitalism has dissolved feudal relations, expanded world markets, concentrated production, remade family and nation, and subjected older loyalties to cash exchange.
The Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, tells how a young, untried knight wins his spurs by freeing a kingdom from a dragon and, on the way, learns how easily a Christian soul is deceived. Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, has sent the Redcrosse Knight, who bears a bloody cross on breast and shield, to help the lady Una, whose royal parents are besieged in their brazen castle by a monstrous dragon.
The Fate of Rome is a history of the Roman Empire from its height in the second century AD to the crises of the seventh, written by the classicist Kyle Harper and published by Princeton University Press in 2017 in its series on the history of the ancient world. Its argument is that the empire's long story cannot be told only through emperors, armies and barbarian peoples: changes in climate and the arrival of new infectious diseases were active forces that repeatedly struck a society whose own success had made it vulnerable.
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's history of the Soviet system of prisons, labour camps and exile, which he likened to an archipelago of islands scattered across the country, visible only to those taken there. Written in secret between 1958 and 1968, it draws on Solzhenitsyn's own eight years as a prisoner and on the testimony of some two hundred and twenty-seven other former prisoners, together with published Soviet sources.
The Hiding Place is Corrie ten Boom's memoir, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, of her family's life in Haarlem, their work hiding Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands, and her imprisonment with her sister Betsie in Nazi prisons and camps. It opens in January 1937 with the hundredth anniversary of the watch shop in the narrow old house called the Beje, where Corrie, then in her forties and unmarried, lives with her father Casper and her older sister Betsie.
Books I-V are the first pentad of Livy's vast history of Rome from its foundation, carrying the story from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy to the recovery of the city after the Gallic sack of about 390 BC. Livy opens with a preface that admits the earliest traditions are closer to poetry than to record, and then states his purpose: history sets before the reader examples of every kind of conduct, to be imitated or avoided, and Rome, he believes, was richer in good examples than any other state until luxury and avarice came late.
The History of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides’ unfinished account of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 411 BCE. Unlike Herodotus’ broad storytelling, Thucydides narrows his gaze to power, fear, interest, decision and the deterioration of civic language under pressure.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again tells how Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable, respectable hobbit of Bag-End under the Hill, is drawn into an adventure he never wanted. The wizard Gandalf marks his door, and thirteen dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield arrive for an unexpected party.
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Greek poems addressed to the gods, composed in the same dactylic hexameter and formulaic language as the Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient audiences treated many of them as Homer's own; most scholars now see them as the work of different singers over a long period, with the four great narrative hymns usually dated to the archaic age and some short pieces much later.
The Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its subject, announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles. A plague sent by Apollo ravages the Greek camp because Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans, has refused to return the captive daughter of Apollo's priest Chryses.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Little Prince is told by a pilot who, as a boy of six, drew a boa constrictor digesting an elephant; every grown-up who saw Drawing Number One took it for a hat, and he gave up art for flying. Years later his engine fails in the Sahara, a thousand miles from anyone, with water for about a week.
Izaak Walton's Lives are short, affectionate biographies of English churchmen, written by a London tradesman and angler who loved the Church of England and the men who served it. The library text is the second volume of the Cassell's National Library edition of 1898, based on John Major's 1825 edition with Austin Dobson's notes, and contains three of the five lives: Richard Hooker (first published 1665), George Herbert (1670) and Robert Sanderson (1678); the lives of Donne and Wotton belong to the first volume and are not included.
The Lord of the Rings continues the story begun in The Hobbit. Sixty years after his adventure, Bilbo Baggins leaves the Shire on his eleventy-first birthday and, at Gandalf's urging, leaves his magic ring to his young cousin and heir Frodo.
The Mayflower Compact is a single paragraph of about two hundred words, signed on 11 November 1620 (Old Style; 21 November by the modern calendar) aboard the ship Mayflower as it lay at anchor in the hook of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown Harbor. The ship had left Plymouth, England, in September with about a hundred passengers.
The Metamorphosis is a novella in three parts about Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman in cloth who supports his parents and his seventeen-year-old sister Grete, and who wakes one morning in his room to find that he has been changed into a monstrous insect. Kafka tells the story plainly, in the third person and almost entirely from Gregor's point of view, never explaining the transformation and never letting it become a dream.
The Muqaddimah (Introduction) is the opening part of Ibn Khaldun's universal history, the Kitab al-Ibar, and has long been read on its own as a treatise on the nature of human society and the method of history. Ibn Khaldun wrote it in 1377 during a retreat from court life at the castle of Qal'at Ibn Salama, in the hills of what is now western Algeria, and kept revising it for the rest of his life in Cairo.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
Mary Rowlandson's narrative tells of the eleven weeks and five days she spent as a captive during King Philip's War, the conflict of 1675-1676 between the New England colonies and an alliance of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc and other Native peoples led in part by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, whom the English called King Philip. It opens on 10 February 1675, by the Old Style calendar then used in English New England (20 February 1676 in modern reckoning), when a large war party attacks Lancaster, Massachusetts.
The Old Man and the Sea follows Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without taking a fish, as he sails far into the Gulf Stream and hooks a marlin larger than his skiff. Hemingway narrows the plot until skill, endurance, hunger, memory, prayer, and pain are concentrated in one body at sea.
The Old Regime and the Revolution (L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution), published in Paris in June 1856, is Alexis de Tocqueville's study of France before 1789. Its argument is that the Revolution, which its makers believed had broken French history in two, in fact completed a work the monarchy had long been doing: the concentration of power in a central administration and the levelling of the French into similar, separated individuals.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is Hannah Arendt's attempt to understand how the Nazi and Soviet regimes, which she treats as a new form of government without precedent, could arise out of European history. It was published in New York by Harcourt, Brace in 1951 (in Britain as The Burden of Our Time).
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures.
The Prince and the Pauper opens in London in October 1537, when two boys are born on the same day: Edward Tudor, longed-for son of Henry VIII, and Tom Canty, unwanted son of a thief in Offal Court, off Pudding Lane. Tom is beaten by his father John and his grandmother, but his gentle mother and sisters Nan and Bet love him, and the old priest Father Andrew teaches him reading, a little Latin, and tales of kings.
The Railway Children tells how Roberta (Bobbie), Peter and Phyllis lose their comfortable London life and find friends, work and courage beside a country railway line. One evening, just after Peter's birthday, two men call, Father goes away with them, and Mother will say only that he has gone on business and that the children must not ask.
Ammianus Marcellinus wrote his history in thirty-one books, beginning with the accession of Nerva in AD 96, where Tacitus had stopped, and ending with the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378. The first thirteen books are lost.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
The Screwtape Letters is a book of thirty-one letters written by Screwtape, a senior devil in the bureaucracy of Hell, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter on his first assignment. Wormwood's charge is a young Englishman, never named and called only the patient, who lives with his mother at the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Sign of the Beaver takes place in the Maine woods in 1768. Matt Hallowell, twelve years old and about to turn thirteen, has helped his father clear land and build a log cabin on a new claim.
The Song of Hiawatha is a book-length poem in twenty-two cantos with an Introduction, retelling legends of the Ojibway and neighbouring peoples around a single hero on the south shore of Lake Superior, which the poem calls Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water. The Introduction presents the songs as gathered by the singer Nawadaha from the forest, the birds and the rivers, and addresses readers who believe every human heart is human.
The Swiss Family Robinson is told by a Swiss pastor who, with his wife and four sons, emigrates by sea toward a new settlement and is shipwrecked after a week-long storm. The crew abandons the ship in the boats, leaving the family alone on a wreck lodged among rocks near an unknown tropical coast.
The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play. In the Induction, the drunken tinker Christopher Sly is thrown out of an alehouse and falls asleep on the heath.
The Underdogs follows Demetrio Macias, a peasant from Juchipila who joins the Mexican Revolution after conflict with federal soldiers makes ordinary life impossible. At first Demetrio's rebellion is local and personal: he flees with a band of men into the hills, fights effectively and becomes a leader because of courage, terrain knowledge and charisma.
The War of the Worlds is told by an unnamed writer on philosophical subjects who lives on Maybury Hill near Woking in Surrey, looking back some years after the events. Book One, The Coming of the Martians, opens with astronomers seeing jets of gas leap from the surface of Mars.
Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in London by Strahan and Cadell on 9 March 1776, asks what makes a nation rich and what policies help or hinder that growth. Smith's answer is that wealth is not a store of gold and silver but the annual produce of a nation's labour, and that it grows chiefly through the division of labour, the accumulation of capital and the freedom to trade.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Unbroken is Laura Hillenbrand's biography of Louis Zamperini, an American runner and Army Air Forces bombardier who survived a plane crash, weeks adrift in the Pacific and more than two years as a prisoner of war in Japan. The book begins with Louie as the restless, thieving son of Italian immigrants in Torrance, California, in the 1920s.
Understood Betsy follows nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann, an orphan raised in a medium-sized Midwestern city by her Great-aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances, a piano teacher who has studied child-rearing books and correspondence courses and is determined that her niece shall be thoroughly understood. Elizabeth Ann is thin, pale and frightened of dogs, thunder and examinations, and Aunt Frances shares and rehearses every fear with her.
Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's account of his rise from a slave cabin in Virginia to the leadership of Tuskegee Institute. He begins with what he does not know: the exact date of his birth, about 1858 or 1859 as he gives it, and the name of his white father.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau's account of the two years and two months, from July 4, 1845, to September 1847, that he spent living alone in a one-room house he built himself beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He compresses the experiment into the cycle of a single year, moving from summer through winter to the thaw of spring, in eighteen chapters.
War and Peace follows several Russian noble families from 1805 to 1820, through the wars against Napoleon and the French invasion of 1812. It opens at a St. Petersburg soirée given by Anna Pávlovna Schérer in July 1805, where talk of Bonaparte mixes with gossip about inheritances.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr. Lockwood, a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, becomes curious about his landlord Heathcliff and the strange household at Wuthering Heights.
Passages
- 12 Years a Slave, Epps plantation chapters
Cotton labor, quotas, whippings, hunger and surveillance show slavery as chronic bodily extraction.
- A Christmas Carol, Stave III
The Cratchit dinner and Tiny Tim's crutch and frail health; the spirit foresees his death if things remain unaltered.
- A Christmas Carol, Stave III
The allegorical starving children Ignorance and Want under the spirit's robe.
- A Little Princess, Chapters 8 and 13
Sara and Becky go to bed cold and hungry; the bun-shop scene shows Sara faint with hunger beside a starving beggar child.
- A Modest Proposal, The statistical mask
A Modest Proposal gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes starvation, infant mortality, public health, reproductive exploitation, and the dehumanizing language of population management
- A Tale of Two Cities, Book I, Chapter 5
The starving people of Saint Antoine scoop spilled wine from the street; Hunger is described as a presence in every house.
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter II
Constitutions, diets and seasons that dispose to smallpox and to measles.
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter V
Preventive bloodletting for those over fourteen, cupping for younger children, cool rooms and a cooling diet.
- A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, The Golden Touch
Midas's breakfast of trout, cakes and coffee turns to gold in his mouth, and he realizes he faces starvation in the midst of riches.
- A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, The Miraculous Pitcher
Baucis and Philemon share their last bread, honey and milk, and are later given renewed age as an oak and a linden.
- Aesop's Fables, The Wolf And The Lamb
The wolf’s hunger drives the invented charges against the lamb.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter XI
Staff surgeons pass half-recovered men as fit; hunger and dysentery in 1918; Kat's shin wound and death from a splinter in the head.
- Animal Farm, Chapter 7
The winter of famine, the concealed shortage, and the hens' resistance ended by stopping their rations until nine hens die.
- Areopagitica, Part two, on reading
Wholesome and unwholesome meats, the vitiated stomach and healthy concoction, and God's leaving the diet of body and mind to temperance.
- As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 3 and Act 2, Scene 6
Adam attributes his healthy old age to avoiding hot liquors in youth, then collapses from hunger in the forest.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Three, §47
The 'religious neurosis' linked to solitude, fasting and sexual abstinence, with speculation about disguised epilepsy and mention of alienists studying the Salvation Army.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Bartleby, middle and end
Bartleby's escalating refusals, his living in the office, removal to the Tombs, refusal to eat and death against the prison wall.
- Centesimus Annus, 1989 and freedom
Centesimus Annus gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is social: work, poverty, family wages, consumerism, and solidarity all shape health before clinical care begins
- Confessions, Book XI
The young heir of the Montmorency-Luxembourg family dies of inanition under a physician's severe regimen, against Rousseau's advice.
- Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 4, Scenes 1-3
The starving cadets at Arras complain of hunger; Cyrano has the fifer play the airs of Gascony.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 11–12
Ten-year-old David's labour at the warehouse and his sense of shame and abandonment.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 13
David's starving, penniless walk from London to Dover.
- Death Comes for the Archbishop, Memory and death
Death Comes for the Archbishop gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes travel hardship, hunger, fever, aging, deathbed care, and the bodily cost of missionary life in an arid landscape
- Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, First Part, on sickness
Rousseau lists the diseases produced by inequalities of labour, diet and passion and argues that most of our ills are of our own making.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 47
As governor of Barataria, Sancho is denied his meals by the physician Pedro Recio de Agüero.
- Early Christian Lives, Life of Antony, early renunciation
Antony sells possessions and begins bodily discipline through solitude, fasting and prayer.
- Early Christian Lives, Jerome, Life of Hilarion
Fasting, travel, miracles and demonic confrontations define the holy man’s authority.
- Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, Didache 1–8
The Two Ways, fasting and baptism show bodily practice as moral formation.
- Fairy Tales (Selection), The Little Match Girl
A barefoot, hungry child dies of cold in a corner on New Year's Eve, seeing visions of a warm stove, a roast goose, a Christmas tree and her dead grandmother.
- Farmer Boy, Chapter 6, "Filling the Ice-house"
Ice is sawed from the pond and packed in sawdust to keep milk, butter and ice cream cold through the summer.
- Farmer Boy, Chapter 26, "Christmas"
The family's holiday dinner, one of the book's long catalogs of farm food.
- Five Children and It, Chapter 6
Inside the wished-for castle, Martha's dinner is invisible and cannot even be felt, and the four children share out a few broken biscuits from Cyril's pocket.
- Heart of Darkness, Part I (Outer Station)
The grove of death where sick, starving African labourers lie dying in the shade.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book II, ch. 23
Four months of epidemic in Constantinople, daily deaths in thousands, burial organised by Theodorus, bodies placed in the towers of Sycae, cessation of trade, and Justinian's own swelling of the groin.
- Household Stories (Grimm's Fairy Tales), Hansel and Grethel, opening
A great dearth leaves the woodcutter unable to earn daily bread, and his wife persuades him to abandon the children in the forest.
- I Will Fight No More Forever, Harper's Weekly text, sentences 8-10
Joseph describes cold, lack of blankets and food, and children freezing in the camp and in the hills.
- Instructions for His Generals, Articles on subsistence and sutlers
Bread supply, field bakeries and the regulated sale of beer and brandy to troops.
- Instructions for His Generals, Articles on battle and on winter campaigns
Losses in attack, the case for short wars, and the strain of winter operations on men and horses.
- Jane Eyre, Chapters V and IX
Lowood's scant, spoiled food and damp situation; the spring typhus epidemic; Helen Burns's death from consumption; the public inquiry and reform that follow.
- Jane Eyre, Chapters XXVIII and XXXVI-XXXVII
Jane's starvation on the moors; the account of the fire, Bertha's death, the amputation of Rochester's hand and his blindness, and his partial recovery of sight.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 7, famine traditions
Famine in biblical history is treated as social crisis and divine judgment, linking hunger, public order and survival.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 20, late provincial unrest
Crowding, executions, famine relief and social disorder in the later books reveal the bodily cost of unstable governance.
- Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie, Late in the storm
Food runs low and Abbie grows worn out from weeks of broken sleep and hard work.
- Kidnapped, Chapter XIV
On Earraid, David lives on raw shellfish and suffers cold, wet and despair.
- Lassie Come-Home, Journey chapters
Dan'l and Dally Fadden take the starved, sick collie into their cottage and nurse her until she is strong enough to go on.
- Lassie Come-Home, Final chapters
Lassie reaches Greenall Bridge thin, lame and nearly spent, and the Carracloughs nurse her back.
- Legends of Charlemagne, Death of Rinaldo
The besieged garrison of Montalban eats its horses; later a pestilence near Cologne is stayed by Rinaldo's prayers.
- Letters of Napoleon, Imperial correspondence on conscription and supply (1805–1809)
Orders on bread, boots, hospitals and conscripts that treat the army's health as a matter of administration.
- Letters of Napoleon, Russian campaign letters and bulletins (1812)
Reports from Moscow and the retreat that understate losses to cold, hunger and disease.
- Life of St. Martin, Life, Ch. 6: hellebore
The poisonous plant episode links ascetic foraging to ancient pharmacology and the dangers of diet.
- Lord of the Flies, Chapter 4
The littluns live on fruit and suffer from stomach-aches and chronic diarrhoea.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part One, second phase
Apathy as emotional protection; hunger, edema and cold; prisoners' fantasies about food; the provisional existence with no foreseeable end.
- Metamorphoses, Book III
Narcissus falls in love with his reflection and wastes away; Echo fades to a voice; Tiresias's change of sex.
- Metamorphoses, Book VIII
Erysichthon, cursed with Hunger by Ceres, eats everything and finally devours his own body.
- Mother Courage and Her Children, Scenes 9 and 12
Hunger in the war-ruined countryside; Courage's lullaby over her dead daughter.
- My Ántonia, Book I (first winter)
The Shimerdas' hunger and hardship in the dugout; Mr Shimerda's homesickness and withdrawal.
- My Side of the Mountain, Early and autumn chapters
Sam's foraging, fishing and food storage, from his hungry first night to the stores he lays up for winter.
- Napoleon's Maxims of War, Maxim XIX, Note
The starving, ill-clothed Army of Italy in 1796, its draught horses dead from want, before Napoleon's offensive.
- Napoleon's Maxims of War, Maxims LVIII–LIX and Notes
Fortitude under fatigue and privation as the soldier's first quality; the four days' provisions and other necessities he must always carry.
- Narrative of the Life and What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, Narrative, childhood and plantation violence
Family separation, whipping, hunger, and terror show slavery as chronic bodily and psychological injury.
- Oliver Twist, Chapter II
The workhouse diet of thin gruel and the boys' hunger before Oliver asks for more.
- On War, Book I, Ch. 5, Of Bodily Exertion in War
Frost, heat, thirst, hunger and fatigue as influences on judgment, and the commander's art of demanding extreme effort from troops.
- On War, Book V, Ch. 14, Subsistence
Feeding mass armies by requisition or magazines and the human cost when supply fails.
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Morning, breakfast
Shukhov eats his skilly and fish bones with careful ritual and hides part of his bread ration for later.
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Midday, the canteen at the work site
Shukhov obtains two extra bowls of porridge, and the narration dwells on the value of each mouthful.
- Principles of Geology, Book II, Ch. XXVIII
Deaths after the Calabrian earthquake of 1783 from epidemics attributed to insufficient food, exposure and malaria from new stagnant lakes.
- Principles of Geology, Book III, Ch. XL–XLI
Epidemic disease and famine from locust swarms discussed as causes of population loss and extinction.
- Rerum Novarum, The duties of the State, on wages
Wages must be enough for the worker's support; the duty of preserving life makes labor necessary as well as personal.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book IV (the march to Aqaba)
The crossing of waterless country in summer; heat, thirst and the search for a lost man in the desert; the near-fatal effects of exhaustion on men and camels.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part One, 'With the Samanas'
Years of fasting, self-mortification and meditative self-loss, which Siddhartha comes to see as temporary escape like intoxication.
- Tanglewood Tales, The Pomegranate Seeds
Ceres in her grief withholds the harvest so that fields and cattle starve, while Proserpina refuses all food for six months in Pluto's palace.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, Chapters 5-7
Alone and starving, Pinocchio searches the house for food, falls asleep with his feet on the foot warmer, and wakes with them burned off; Geppetto feeds him his own pears.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, Chapter 36
Pinocchio draws water each dawn to earn milk for his weak father, builds him a wheeled chair, and finds his friend Lamp-Wick dying as an overworked donkey.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 33
Injun Joe is found dead of starvation behind the sealed cave door.
- The Age of Fable, Chapter XXII, Erisichthon
Ceres sends Famine to a man who cut down her sacred oak; his hunger grows with every meal until he devours his own body.
- The Argonautica, Book II, Phineus and the Harpies
The blind old prophet, starved by the Harpies, totters out to meet the heroes and is fed once the sons of Boreas drive the birds away.
- The Art of the Commonplace, Technology and scale
The Art of the Commonplace gives this tag concrete force through his medical relevance lies in public health broadly conceived: food systems, labor, ecological damage, loneliness, and the social conditions of flourishing
- The Art of War, Book VII (General rules of war)
The maxim preferring to defeat an enemy by famine rather than by the sword.
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (remedies against national calamities)
State measures against fire, flood, epidemic disease, famine and pests.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 6.16–6.17
Yoga is not for one who eats or sleeps too much or too little; moderation in food, recreation, sleep and waking.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 17.7–17.10
Foods classified as sattvic, rajasic and tamasic, with their effects on health, mood and vitality.
- The Call of the Wild, Chapter V
Hal and Charles halve the dogs' rations, then feed them frozen horse-hide; the dogs die one by one of exhaustion and hunger.
- The Civil War, Book I.48–52
Floods cut Caesar's army off from supply near Ilerda; famine prices and hardship in the camp until the bridges are restored.
- The Civil War, Book I.81–84
The Pompeian army in Spain, cut off from water and forage, kills its baggage animals and surrenders.
- The Civil War, Book II.22
Massilia's surrender after famine and a fatal pestilence attributed to confinement and old millet and barley.
- The Civil War, Book III.47–49
Dyrrachium: Caesar's troops eat chara bread and bark; Pompey's army suffers from foul smells, carcasses, hard labour and lack of water after Caesar dams the streams.
- The Commonwealth of Oceana, Morley's Introduction
Harrington's imprisonment, scurvy, mental breakdown, later gout and palsy.
- The Communist Manifesto, Communists and demands
The Communist Manifesto gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance lies in social medicine: labor conditions, poverty, urbanization, family disruption, and the political diagnosis of suffering
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VII.17
The Roman army before Avaricum goes days without corn, living on cattle driven in from distant villages.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VII.77–78
Critognatus's speech proposing cannibalism, and the Mandubii, including old and sick people unfit for war, expelled from Alesia and refused food at the Roman lines.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Château d'If chapters (before 'Number 34 and Number 27')
Dantès, despairing in solitary confinement, resolves to die by refusing food.
- The Faerie Queene, Book I, Book I, Canto VIII, stanzas 40-41
Redcrosse is brought out of the dungeon pale, wasted and too weak to stand.
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Chapter 2, The Happiest Age
Endemic disease, mortality, stature and the health of Roman populations at the Antonine peak.
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Chapter 6, The Wine-Press of Wrath
The first bubonic plague pandemic from 541, its biology, routes and mortality, alongside the volcanic cooling of the 530s.
- The Gulag Archipelago, Part I, chapter on interrogation
Methods of interrogation, including sleep deprivation, cold, hunger and prolonged standing, and their effects on body and will.
- The Gulag Archipelago, Part III, chapters on camp life
Rations, work norms and the progressive wasting of prisoners; the camp medical unit and the role of doctors in certifying fitness for work.
- The Hiding Place, Chapters 13-14
Ravensbrück: hunger, cold roll calls, fleas and lice, the shared vitamin drops, and Betsie's decline and death in the camp hospital.
- The Hiding Place, Chapter 15
Corrie's release is delayed for swelling of the legs; afterwards she opens homes where survivors and others damaged by the war recover.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book II, ch. 32
Menenius Agrippa's fable of the limbs that starve the belly, with its account of food made into blood for the veins.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book III, chs. 6-8 and 32
Pestilence kills consuls, augurs and much of the people while the Aequi and Volsci press on the city; later plague and famine come together.
- The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 7.75–87
The Sicilian retreat culminates in thirst, slaughter, imprisonment in quarries and catastrophic defeat.
- The Hobbit, Chapter 8: Flies and Spiders
Food runs out in Mirkwood; Bombur falls into the enchanted stream and sleeps, dreaming of feasts.
- The Homeric Hymns, Hymn II, To Demeter, ll. 40-53 and 301-320
Demeter's mourning and fasting, then the year of barren fields that nearly destroys mankind.
- The Iliad, Book 19
Achilles refuses food before battle; Athena sustains him with nectar and ambrosia.
- The Jewish War, Book 5, Jerusalem under siege
Crowding, corpses, factional violence and the shrinking food supply turn Jerusalem into a public health crisis before the final assault.
- The Jewish War, Book 6, famine in Jerusalem
The famine reaches its most extreme form, including the story of a mother driven to cannibalism, which Josephus uses as a sign of social and bodily collapse.
- The Koran, Sura 2:183–185
Fasting in Ramadan, with exemptions for the sick and travellers.
- The Little Prince, Chapters XXIII-XXV
The merchant's thirst-quenching pills; the pilot's water runs out and he and the prince walk to the well.
- The Lives of Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson, Life of Hooker, last illness
Hooker's long sickness after a cold, his restless nights, his loss of appetite and his final conversation with Saravia.
- The Lord of the Rings, Book VI, Chapters 2-3
Frodo and Sam cross Mordor short of water and food, Sam rationing what is left and finally carrying his master.
- The Metamorphosis, Part III
Gregor stops eating, wastes away, and dies alone at dawn; the charwoman finds the dried body and the family feels relief.
- The Muqaddimah, Chapter 1 (effects of abundance and hunger)
Desert peoples with scanty food compared favourably in body and mind with well-fed city dwellers; the benefits of hunger.
- The Muqaddimah, Chapter 3 (end of dynasties)
Famine and plague increasing at the end of a dynasty, attributed in part to the corruption of the air in crowded cities.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 4-7
Pym's confinement in the Grampus hold combines darkness, foul air, hunger, thirst, fear and possible delirious misperception.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 10-12
After mutiny and storm, the survivors face wounds, thirst and starvation on the wreck before drawing lots for cannibalism.
- The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, The Fifth to Nineteenth Removes
Extreme hunger, the foods eaten in the camps, and the scarcity the whole company faces on the march.
- The Old Man and the Sea, The sharks
The Old Man and the Sea gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is practical and bodily: age, cramps, hand wounds, exhaustion, starvation, pain tolerance, and the dignity of care between santiago and manolin
- The Old Regime and the Revolution, Book II, chs. 12 and 17
The peasant's condition in years of dearth, and the intendants' relief measures, which publicized the misery they meant to ease.
- The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part Three, ch. 12, Total Domination
The camps as laboratories of total domination; the killing of the juridical person, the moral person and individuality.
- The Persian Expedition, Book IV, Chapter V
The Armenian snows: deep drifts, a north wind, men dying overnight without fire or food, hunger-faintness, snow-blindness and frostbitten toes, with practical remedies.
- The Power and the Glory, Village and flight chapters
The priest's craving for alcohol recurs alongside fear, fatigue, hunger and the need to perform sacraments.
- The Prince and the Pauper, Chapter XVII
Yokel tells how his mother, who nursed the sick, was burned as a witch when a patient died, and how his children starved.
- The Railway Children, Chapter III, The old gentleman
Dr Forrest diagnoses Mother's influenza and lists what she needs; the children ask the old gentleman for it.
- The Roman History, Book XXXI, ch. 4
Starving Gothic refugees on the Danube are forced by Roman officers to trade for food on ruinous terms.
- The Rule of St Benedict, Chapters 39–41
Food, drink, wine and meal times are regulated with moderation and adaptation.
- The Screwtape Letters, Letter XVII
The patient's mother demands tiny, exactly prepared portions and makes the household miserable; Screwtape calls this gluttony of delicacy.
- The Secret Garden, Early Misselthwaite chapters
Mary's sourness, poor appetite and lack of affection are linked to neglect, environment and bodily habits.
- The Sign of the Beaver, Chapters 23-24
Matt lays in meat, fish and firewood, and makes mittens and a cap from skins, to last a winter alone.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto V, Hiawatha's Fasting
Seven days of fasting with exhaustion and visions before the wrestling with Mondamin.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto XX, The Famine
Famine and Fever enter the wigwam; Minnehaha's delirium and death; Hiawatha sits seven days speechless.
- The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter II-III
The father tests unfamiliar fruits and foods before letting the children eat them, a practical lesson in caution with unknown plants.
- The Taming of the Shrew, Act 4, Scene 1
Petruchio throws out the supper as burnt meat that engenders choler, then explains in soliloquy his plan to keep Kate hungry and sleepless like an untrained hawk.
- The Taming of the Shrew, Act 4, Scene 3
Grumio offers the starving Kate one dish after another and withdraws each as too choleric.
- The Underdogs, Camp and march episodes
The fighters' drinking, hunger, fatigue and casual violence create a field medicine atmosphere without stable institutions.
- The War of the Worlds, Book Two, Chapters III-IV (The Days of Imprisonment; The Death of the Curate)
Hunger and thirst in the ruined house at Sheen, the curate's drinking and loud raving, and the narrator's struggle to keep his own self-command.
- The Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. viii
Poverty and child mortality in the Highlands of Scotland; the poor bear many children but rear few.
- The World as Will and Representation, Fourth Book, §§68–69
Asceticism, fasting and self-mortification; suicide as affirmation of the will; voluntary starvation by ascetics, with cases reported in contemporary sources.
- Theogony and Works and Days, Works and Days, ll. 225-247
The just city knows no famine; the unjust city suffers famine and plague sent by Zeus, and its women bear no children.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book IV
Separation intensifies Troilus's despair, appetite loss and fixation on Criseyde's return.
- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Part III (the raft)
Thirst, rain-catching, rationing, raw food, shark attacks and the men's physical decline over forty-seven days.
- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Part IV (Omori and Naoetsu)
Hunger, dysentery, beatings and forced labor in the prisoner-of-war camps.
- Understood Betsy, Chapters VIII-IX
'Lias Brewster's hunger and neglect, and his stepfather's selling the new clothes for whiskey.
- Walden, Economy
The diagnosis of quiet desperation among Concord's laboring men, followed by the inventory of necessaries and Thoreau's food accounts.
- War and Peace, Book Fourteen, Chs. XII–XIV
Pierre's march with the prisoners in the French retreat: hunger, sore feet, cold, and the shooting of Karatáev.
- White Fang, Part III, Chapter VI
Famine in the Indian camp: dogs eat each other and their harness, and White Fang flees to the woods to hunt alone.
- Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's final days
Heathcliff's visions of Catherine, refusal of food and death show grief as obsessive bodily unraveling.
Quotes
“If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy”
“"She is hungrier than I am," she said to herself. "She's starving."”
“A man in health possesses more of it than one languishing with sickness. We are more master of our thoughts in the morning than in the evening: Fasting, than after a full meal”
“Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence”
“At length, notwithstanding all I could say and do, the physician triumphed, and the child died of hunger”
“A nobler pain than hunger,--'tis of the soul, not of the body!”
“a man's own observation, what he finds good of, and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health”
“a gouty patient, for instance, can choose to enjoy what he likes, and to suffer what he may”
Frequently cited
“whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together”
“Brother, let Bayard live a little longer; who knows what God may do for us?”
“Here he subsisted for some time on the roots of plants; and, while doing so, he took for food hellebore, which is, as people say, a poisonous kind of grass”
“The first qualification of a soldier is fortitude under fatigue and privation. Courage is only the second; hardship, poverty and want, are the best school for a soldier”
Frequently cited
“Please, sir, I want some more.”
“Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery.”
“It is better to conquere the enemie with faminne, then with yron: in the victorie of which, fortune maie doe much more then valiantnesse”
“struggling moreover with a fatal pestilence, from their long confinement and change of victuals (for they all subsisted on old millet and damaged barley, which they had formerly provided and laid up in the public stores against an emergency of this kind”
“There was a sort of root, called chara, discovered by the troops which served under Valerius. This they mixed up with milk, and it greatly contributed to relieve their want”
“To be unable to bear privation for a short time is disgraceful cowardice, not true valour. Those who voluntarily offer themselves to death are more easily found than those who would calmly endure distress”
“supported life by the corpses of those who appeared useless for war on account of their age, and did not surrender to the enemy”
“When these came to the Roman fortifications, weeping, they begged of the soldiers by every entreaty to receive them as slaves and relieve them with food. But Caesar, placing guards on the rampart, forbade them to be admitted”
“many of the men were afflicted with "boulimia" (or hunger-faintness”
Frequently cited
“it was crime to be hungry in England”
Frequently cited
“This is a way to kill a wife with kindness”
“It is starvation, voluntarily chosen on the ground of extreme asceticism”