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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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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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