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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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