A quiet violence today stalks the villages and shanty towns of the Third World, the violence of needless hunger. In this book, two Bengali-seaking Americans take the reader to a Bangladesh village where they lived for nine months.

There, the readers meets some of the world's poorest people - peasants, sharecroppers and landless labourers - and some of the not-so-poor people who profit from their misery. The villager's poverty is not fortuitous, a result of divine dispensation or individual failings of charachter. 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.