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 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.… (mehr)