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This is a difficult book to get through on account of the overwhelming amount of horrible deaths described in detail during the first third of the book. However, the payoff is worth it. Part one describes the settings and the suffering engendered by famine-driven starvation during the last 2 - 3 decades of the 19th century, in painful detail. It focuses primarily on Brazil, India, and China. It emphasizes the human suffering and the callousness of most of the official responses by British officials, who were in the position to the most (or, more typically, the least) to help those affected. In part two, the author takes us along on a ride through scientific history, explaining how climatologists came to understand, partially anyway, the mechanisms of ENSO (or El Nino/La Nina). Part three combines these and takes us back to the antecedent conditions in Brazil, India, and China, demonstrating how the capitalist need to force peasants around the world into participating in the global market economy made mass starvation likely, and how the British official response contrasted mostly negatively with those of the respective native rulers in similar events in the past. The conclusion: drought or flooding caused by El Nino or La Nina was the proximate cause, but without capitalism, the death toll, reckoned at around 100 million for the entire 3-decade era focused on in the book, would surely have been far lower. Famines are never purely ecologically caused, they always have a political dimension.

A fascinating story about a city that is cursed (or blessed) by a demon that loves the city and the people who live in it, in a world where demons, angels (and other beings) can affect the lives of people and animals in subtle, and sometimes, devastating ways.

The demon drops hints and alters the destinies of people, keeping the city a lively place, which she then notes down in her book, which she keeps in her heart. But it comes to an abrupt end when angels appear and devastate the city. In her rage, the demon curses one of the angels.

The demon goes through the remains of her city, remembering the people that once lived there and the places they occupied, and starts to clean up. She occasionally meets the cursed angel, now bound to remain on earth as long as her curse remains in him. She rages at him for the destruction caused and for the lives lost. And yet, they still find a way to live in the remains of the city. As the years past and the destruction is gradually cleaned up, the angel leads survivors of another war to the city. Slowly, the city becomes alive again as the population grows and others arrive. Once again, the demon interacts with the inhabitants, altering their lives, but now in concert with the angel who has now lost some of the aloofness of angels (as well as other aspects) as the price for staying in the city.

Then, once again, devastation threatens the city. Only, this time, the city has a demon and an angel claiming it, and who knows what they will now do to the city.