A Quiet Violence: View From a Bangladesh Village - Paperback

by James K. Boyce (Author), Betsy Hartmann (Author)

A quiet violence today stalks the villages and shanty towns of the Third World, the violence of needless hunger. In this book, two Bengali-speaking Americans take the reader to a Bangladesh village where they lived for nine months. There, the reader meets some of the world's poorest people - peasants, sharecroppers and landless labourers - and some of the not-so-poor people who profit from their misery. The villagers' poverty is not fortuitous, a result of divine dispensation or individual failings of character. Rather, it is the outcome of a long history of exploitation, culminating in a social order which today benefits a few at the expense of many.

Author Biography

Betsy Hartman and James Boyce lived in Bangladesh and India for several years. They have written for numerous journals on development issues in Asia, notably for THE NATION, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, and THE NEW INTERNATIONALIST. James Boyce is a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Betsy Hartmann teaches at Hampshire College where she runs the Population and Development Programs.