Can I tell you something?
I was twelve years old when Paul and Anne Erlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, and although I could read reasonably well then it wasn’t a school assignment, so I didn’t read it. When I finally cracked it in the late '70s, I was appalled no one had told me I was going to die before the decade was over. The authors of the book don’t waste a lot of time laying groundwork for their thesis or providing historical context, but basically run across the ring at the bell and hit you in the mouth with this:
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”