Author Description

Foreword by Sir Julian Huxley.The history of plant diseases is rich in human consequences. It was wheat rust that caused the ancient Israelites to migrate to Egypt. Ergot of rye, source of the dreaded "holy fire", and of the modern LSD, destroyed the armies of Peter the Great at Astrakhan in 1722. Potato blight laid waste the economy of Ireland in the 1840s, and led to migrations that changed the history of the New World. England might well have been a nation of coffee-drinkers today had not the wind-borne spores of rust destroyed the coffee-trees of Ceylon in the 1880s and caused the economy of the country to be switched to tea-growing.Throughout the world, the twin problems of human fertility and agricultural impotence are multiplied by the relentless progress of parasitic plant diseases that compete for man's food. Famine on the Wind tells of some of these diseases, and of the painstaking efforts of scientists to overcome them. The book was chosen by the American Library Association as one of the best scientific books of 1967, and was highly recommended to younger readers as well as to the adult public.G. L. Carefoot and E. R. Sprott are Canadians.