Reviews for Vows: The African-American Couples' Guide to Designing a Sacred Ceremony

The average rating for Vows: The African-American Couples' Guide to Designing a Sacred Ceremony based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-19 00:00:00 Stiaan De Villiers Reading about famine in a coffeehouse is always an exercise in gratitude'glad I'm not facing food insecurity. This was rec'd as the best history of famines and it is certainly a disturbing overview. One thing that astonished me is the degree to which social scientists can report with confidence estimates of deaths from centuries ago. Item: Women survive famines more than men. The author, a historian of Irish economics, compares the causes and severity of famines'from Ireland in the 1840s to Bengal in the 1940s'far too many recorded famines than I imagined. I would have like to have read more about the role of states' policies, esp from Communism and colonialism, "workhouses" and indifferent elites. What is missing is the barrage of horror stories one finds in say, Davis's traumatizing book Late Victorian Holocausts. Because of this, O Grada throws around figures (only so many thousand deaths) that become mere numbers in the sweep of sweeping history. Even given this, an excellent book.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-05-02 00:00:00 David Hunt Not the most thorough history, but a accessible overview of recent famines & Irish famines, and the literature and competing theories about how they occur, mostly from an economic perspective. "Famine" here is very distinct from chronic food insecurity and malnutrition, contrasting with other books I've read that consider famine to be an extreme form of seasonal hunger. Grada challenges a few accepted theories that dominate (I think everyone who writes about famine feels compelled to challenge Sen but not give up on him). I wasn't convinced by a lot of the opnion here, but the collection was nice.