In War and Famine uses a small key - the author's family letters and infant memories - to unlock a whole world. Erleen Christensen was a mish kid, the daughter of one of about two hundred missionaries who remained in China's Honan province during World War II and the civil war that followed. She provides an eye-witness account using letters, diaries, and personal accounts, many still in private hands, of one of the worst famines in China's history and the great devastation caused by advancing Japanese troops. Christensen chronicles how a religiously diverse group of Westerners tried to distribute famine relief and conduct humanitarian and educational missions in the face of rising nationalism, autonomy, and resistance to foreign intervention.

While the principle narrator is Christensen's father, a young missionary doctor who, in a hair-raising journey, smuggled his family behind Japanese battlelines the year before Pearl Harbor, Christensen also tells the story of the many other missionaries who also sought to relieve the suffering of innocents caught in the crossfire of war and revolution - brave women who marched orphans through enemy lines, missionaries turned OSS intelligence officers, a Canadian Anglican cleric, a Swiss trainer of seeing-eye dogs, and a diplomat who travelled the province by bicycle.