Roger Thurow has been a Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent for twenty years and has reported from more than sixty countries, including two dozen in Africa.

Co-authors Thurow and Kilman have teamed up to produce a stream of page 1 stories in the Journal that have broken new ground in our understanding of the forces behind famine.

Their pieces on three 2003 famines were a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. In 2005, Thurow and Kilman were honored by the United Nations for their reporting on humanitarian and development issues.

For more than forty years, humankind has had the knowledge, tools, and resources to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet at the start of the twenty-first century, 25,000 people a day — and nearly six million children a year — die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases. Malnutrition kills more Africans than AIDS and malaria combined.

We in the West tend to think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought; or as the legacy of war and corrupt leaders. But Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, award-winning writers on Africa, development, and agriculture, see famine as the result of bad policies spanning the political spectrum. In this compelling investigative narrative, they explain through vivid human stories how the agricultural revolutions that transformed Asia and Latin America stopped short in Africa, and how our sometimes well-intentioned strategies—alternating with ignorance and neglect—have conspired to keep the world’s poorest people hungry and unable to feed themselves.

And they argue passionately and convincingly that this generation is the one that could finally end the scourge that has haunted the human race since its beginning.