An astute, evenhanded history of a business often portrayed, with good reason, as a villain.
Digging deep into the murky world of the agrochemical giant.
By 2005, Monsanto had become the world’s largest seller of seeds. Elmore, a professor of environmental and business history and author of Citizen Coke (2016), has done his homework to deliver an insightful chronicle of Monsanto since its 1901 founding. Struggling with vicious competition, it faced bankruptcy for years before turning the corner with its major products, saccharine and caffeine, and a big customer: Coca-Cola. In a forecast of what was to come, Monsanto fought off government efforts to brand both as toxic adulterants. Diversifying into chemicals in the 1920s, Monsanto hit the jackpot after 1935 with its monopoly on polychlorinated biphenyls, essential in electrical insulation, paints, and plastics. PCBs turned out to be fiercely toxic, led to a torrent of litigation, and were ultimately banned. Turning from industry to agriculture after World War II, Monsanto produced powerful herbicides that were spread over huge areas of Vietnam as defoliants, devastating that nation’s forests and sickening innumerable Vietnamese and Americans exposed to it. Monsanto’s bestseller today, Roundup Ready, are seeds genetically engineered to tolerate herbicides. Resistant seeds now produce more than 90% of the cotton, corn, and soybeans in the U.S. and are spreading across the world. They seemed miraculous when introduced during the 1990s, but they cost more and don’t increase yields. Herbicide-resistant weeds are spreading, and Monsanto continues to fiercely defend its patents. Elmore admits that the Earth could not support 8 billion humans without high-tech agriculture and chemicals. The future will require more, but we’ve underestimated their dangers and surrendered too much control to institutions whose priority is making a profit and who spread disease and destruction to achieve it. Elmore’s gimlet eye reveals that, although an energetic and creative enterprise, Monsanto did not break the mold. For more alarming information about Roundup, pair this book with Stephanie Seneff’s Toxic Legacy (2021).
An astute, evenhanded history of a business often portrayed, with good reason, as a villain.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-324-00204-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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