A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village
by Betsy Hartmann and James K. Boyce

Food First, San Francisco
Zed Books, London
Originally published 1983

Description of A Quiet Violence

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 laborers - 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.

Praise for A Quiet Violence

Beautifully written, the book is a timely reminder of the quiet violence that oppresses the poor throughout the developing world.
- Tony Jackson, New Internationalist

Here, in microcosm, is a fascinating, carefully constructed account of the way life works in a million Third World villages.
- Susan George, author of How the Other Half Dies

A book written by insiders, able to see as well as a Bangladeshi the social mechanisms which rule village, town and country.
- Dr. Zafrullah Chowdhury, People’s Health Center, Savar, Bangladesh

Through the sensitive eyes of Hartmann and Boyce, we meet some of the extraordinary people whose lives and struggles are hidden in the anonymous statistics of world hunger.  Their powerful, first-hand account enables us to pierce through the many myths about the world’s hungry majority…by taking us with them into a single country – a single village.
- Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet