Nick Cullather

Things this book does well: re-examine the narrative about the "green revolution," and disentangle the ways that development as a practice involving food and populations, uh, well, 'developed.' It really denaturalized the history of that practice and the theories surrounding it, and for that I think it is honestly worth checking out.

Things I struggled with in this book: it feels like it bounces all over the place geographically and to some extent temporally, at least in the latter half of show more the book? There were some historical figures who I really struggled to keep straight even as they appeared again and again. Also I read the e-book which comes with zero pictures, which is annoying. Also the conclusion struck me as very weird (there's a bit where he was like "PEOPLE DON'T CARE ABOUT FOOD-RELATED DEVELOPMENT ANY MORE BECAUSE OF 24-HOUR NEWS ON TV" and I was like 'that's not what your book is about but ok') and really jolted me out of the book in general. Also it just isn't generally the kind of book I find very interesting in the first place, so that was something that is my fault, not the book's.

All that being said, again, I would actually recommend this book because I think it has some important things to say about the ways that food-related development projects have been run historically (it stupidly had never occurred to me that 'there are starving children in China!' was a phrase more to do with defeating Communism than about actual children...) and I think that is really important in the politics around development today. show less