A colorful, wholly absorbing narrative tapestry.
The past and future of a coveted fabric.
Geneticist Prasad, author of In the Bonesetter's Waiting Room, delivers a vibrant cultural and scientific history of an amazing natural fiber: silk. From a diet of mulberry leaves, the caterpillars that Linnaeus called Bombyx mori extrude threads that form a cocoon, protecting them as they transform into moths. The extraordinary properties of this thread became the basis of cloth-making by Neolithic Chinese farmers, who bred and harvested the silkworms and also used the eggs, larvae, pupae, and feces in traditional medicines, dyes, fertilizers, and flavoring. However, silk-making did not originate only in China. Archaeological expeditions to India have found evidence of silk in artifacts made between 2450 and 2000 B.C.E.—not from Bombyx mori, but from other distinct types of moths across the subcontinent. Besides tracing the earliest evidence of silk production, Prasad creates richly detailed portraits of the many 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century naturalists who devoted themselves to investigating the mysterious process of metamorphosis, the anatomy of silkworms, and the properties of silk threads, making intrepid journeys in search of caterpillars. Although prized for the shimmering luster that made it a hugely profitable commodity in international trade, silk—especially spider silk—is also extremely strong, making it useful for suturing and dressing wounds and for military use, including creating crosshairs, parachutes, and bullet-proof vests. The forcible silking of spiders gave rise to various contraptions whereby spiders would be immobilized and stimulated to produce extrusions 52 times finer and “nearly three times stronger, more elastic, and more durable than the moth’s.” Prasad reports much scientific interest in producing synthetic spider silk proteins that could offer a “biodegradable antidote to plastic”; thus far, it has been a daunting challenge. The book is generously illustrated with scientific drawings and photos.
A colorful, wholly absorbing narrative tapestry.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780063160255
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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