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children. “If a rising caloric tide tends to float all boats by masking nutritional inequalities,” Cox observes, “then in bad times, as the tide goes out, the inherent inequities of the system are starkly revealed by weight loss and the increased mortality of the most vulnerable members of society: children, women, and the elderly. Furthermore, tacitly assuming that calories were evenly divided within a household is not consistent with what is known about poor families in other times and places” (130–131). In Chapters 4 and 5, Cox extends this analysis to the question of whether rural German children were nutritionally better off than urban ones (she concludes that they were not), and then turns to the question of which children suffered when by utilizing an anthropometric study involving 600,000 schoolchildren studied from 1914 to 1924. Here Cox finds that poor children were recovering their height and weight norms beginning in 1918, but that middleclass and upper-class children had to wait until 1920–1921 (203). Using again a mixture of qualitative and quantitative sources, Cox argues that the surprising early recovery of poorer children reflected the efficacy of international assistance delivered after the war. The final chapters of the book document the flood of food aid after 1918 and children’s response to it, including crayon drawings and heartfelt letters of gratitude, many of them reproduced in the book. What are we to make of this? On the one hand, this book certainly pushes the conversation about German hunger in new directions. It unearths new sources and uses new methods to break down Offer’s monolithic Germany into discrete groups of Germans with varying experiences of hunger. Cox also paints a fresh picture of postwar food aid and its impact on the bodies as well as the spirits of German children. On the other hand, some readers may find that anthropometrics, with its veneer of objectivity, cannot resolve a debate that is inherently political. Did Germans starve? What is hunger anyway? Metrics such as BMI, BMR, and CED, after all, were designed in the years after World War II in order to depoliticize hunger. Applying them here yields new insights, but is unlikely to end the debate over German hunger.