A capable work of cat-and-mouse espionage that suggests that industrial spying is just business as usual.
Chinese spying meets American incompetence in a story of several gangs that couldn’t shoot straight.
Practitioners of industrial espionage don’t just skulk around factories photographing blueprints and machinery. In the case that journalist Hvistendahl (Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, 2011), a former Shanghai correspondent for Science, brings to light, a Chinese national was found wandering in an Iowa cornfield, looking for samples of Monsanto’s genetically modified corn to take home and decode. Iowa was a natural ground zero for a crop that covers more than 93 million acres, “a swath nearly the size of California.” The would-be spy was a disaffected researcher who had lost a job in an American lab and been recruited by his sister, who in turn was married to the CEO of a giant Chinese agribusiness, part of an effort to make China the undisputed leader in exporting food around the world. Arrested in the U.S., the sister went free over botched police procedures. Her brother wasn’t so lucky even though helpful police officers who found him in that Iowa field referred him to local farmers and agricultural extension agencies with any questions he might have about the corn in question. As Hvistendahl observes, connecting many dots, the case had numerous implications, fueling Donald Trump’s nativist threats of trade war with China and China’s retaliation with a 25% tax on American corn. “When the measures finally took hold,” she writes, “it was clear that farmers in Iowa—the same people who helped to elect Trump—would be hard hit.” And so they were, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The author doesn’t diminish the presence of Chinese spies, who have been exposed in numerous enterprises; she also digs deep into the rather nefarious business of genetic modification, which so tarnished the Monsanto name that the brand name is being retired under new ownership, “an unusual move in the acquisition of an established firm.”
A capable work of cat-and-mouse espionage that suggests that industrial spying is just business as usual.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1428-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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