“An intellectual history of a biological urge. Russell probes the 19th century fascination with fastin artists, introduces us to an obese man who lost weight by eating nothing at all for a year and tells the tale of underground Jewish doctors studying famine in the Warsaw ghetto. Unnatural History explains why the average hunger striker can last about 40 days without food, tells us how to best refeed a person on the edge of starvation and tries to explain why nearly a billion people worldwide don’t get enoug to eat. A hugely original and fascinating book”-From Psychology today