Modern Hungers contributes to a growing trend in German historiography of bridging rather than assuming (or even highlighting) ruptures of state and society in the twentieth century. Indeed, central to Weinreb's argument is that the particular pressures of the two world wars, the depression, dictatorship, and the cold war critically informed the trajectory of the modern politics of food...Modern Hungers offers a readable, teachable, and accessible
master class in biopolitical analysis of modern statecraft. The politics of starving bodies, raced bodies, gendered bodies, and fat bodies in the twentieth century is not a story unique to Germany; it is rather an ongoing story to this day...Interdisciplinary scholars of food, hunger, and satiety in almost every
context would do well to take note of this important book and consider its applications for their own fields of study.
Alice Weinreb is an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago.