Summary
From the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493 --an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow's world.
In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back ! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose ! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate ! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win ! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.
Author Notes
Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired. He has also written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, the television network HBO, and the television series Law and Order. He has received writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation.
He has written or co-written several books including The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics, The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and 100 Years of Rampant Competition, Noah's Choice: The Future of Endangered Species, At Large: The Strange Case of the Internet's Biggest Invasion, and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created which made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012. His book, 1491, won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Mann (1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created) clearly illustrates two opposing outlooks for dealing with major problems facing humankind, using two 20th-century scientists as exemplars. Mann straightforwardly states that this book does not provide "a blueprint for tomorrow." Rather, it's an account of difficulties facing humans and ways to approach them. William Vogt (1902-1968), who serves as Mann's "prophet," regarded human overconsumption as a potential source of humanity's downfall and saw restraint as the only possible recourse. Mann's "wizard" is Norman Borlaug (1914-2009), a leading figure in the "green revolution" of agricultural technology. For followers of Borlaug, science and technology hold the solutions to the problems that beset humankind. Mann juxtaposes these two lives and ideologies while briefly introducing a third viewpoint-that of biologist Lynn Margulis, who posited that humankind is doomed to extinction like any other "successful species." In tracing the lives of Vogt and Borlaug, Mann describes how proponents of the two contrasting viewpoints that they epitomize suggest that humans should confront the challenges of providing food, clean water, and energy to an ever-growing population on a planet undergoing climate change. Neither ideology, he points out, is assured to bring humankind success. Without taking sides, Mann delivers a fine examination of two possible paths to a livable future. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Environmental issues are complicated, and we often find ourselves of two minds about how we should address them. Much-lauded journalist Mann, also the author of two best-selling history books, 1493 (2011) and 1491 (2005), pegs our divided outlooks to two seminal yet overlooked scientists whose opposing viewpoints underlie the two primary channels through which environmental thought and practices flow. William Vogt is the Prophet. A book-loving boy enchanted by then-bucolic Long Island, he came to perceive that all species, ours included, are part of ecosystems ruled by biological law, and urged people to live within and preserve nature's intricate balance and finite resources. The Wizard is Norman Borlaug. Raised on a subsistence Iowa family farm, he became a tenacious plant geneticist who launched the Green Revolution of the 1960s and steadfastly championed science as the way to meet our species' needs. As Mann profiles, with verve and infectious fascination, both brilliant, questing men, he places their extraordinary adventures and achievements within a dynamically detailed, global scientific and geopolitical context and tracks their profound influence on our struggles over energy, fresh water, and agriculture as climate change accelerates and humankind surges toward the 10-billion mark. This unique, encompassing, clarifying, engrossing, inquisitive, and caring work of multifaceted research, synthesis, and analysis humanizes the challenges and contradictions of modern environmentalism and our struggle toward a viable future. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A full schedule of media appearances, a national author tour, and a robust, diversified publicity campaign will support popular-writer Mann's fresh and stimulating look at a crucial subject.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN EVERY MOMENT WE ARE STILL ALIVE, by Tom Malmquist. (Melville House, $25.99.) Based on a true story, this searing autobiographical novel, translated from the Swedish by Henning Koch, depicts a father struggling to cope with the tragic loss of his partner just as their daughter is born. EATING ETERNITY: Food, Art and Literature in France, by John Baxter. (Museyon, paper, $19.95.) A wide-ranging, lavishly illustrated guide to French gastronomy that broadens its subject into the fields of art and literature and the culture at large. Who ever suspected that Proust's famous madeleine almost lost out to a plain slice of toast? THE AFTERLIVES, by Thomas Pierce. (Riverhead, $27.) In Pierce's warm and inventive debut novel, about a heart attack victim who finds the world subtly changed, the feeling that nothing's quite real - that perhaps everything is a fever dream in the narrator's dying brain - nags at him, and at us. NINE CONTINENTS: A Memoir In and Out of China, by Xiaoli Guo. (Grove, $26.) Guo, a writer and filmmaker, grew up in China at a time of deprivation. The Beijing Film Academy introduced her to a more cosmopolitan world; now in London, she has been acclaimed one of Britain's best young novelists. THE WIZARD AND THE PROPHET: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World, byCharlesC. Mann. (Knopf, $28.95.) The essential debate of environmentalism - to respect limits, or transcend them? - as seen through the lives of two men, William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. THE SABOTEUR: The Aristocrat Who Became France's Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, by Paul Kix. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Dashing and brave, Robert de La Rochefoucauld was a member of the French Resistance who came from an aristocratic family. Kix details his exploits and many death-defying escapes during the war. MUNICH, by Robert Harris. (Knopf, $27.95.) An expertly paced thriller featuring two junior diplomats, once friends at Oxford but now members of the opposing German and British delegations that would seal the fate of Czechoslovakia by permitting the Nazis to occupy it in 1938. RESERVOIR 13, by Jon McGregor. (Catapult, paper, $16.95.) McGregor's fourth novel opens with the disappearance of a teenage girl visiting an English village, but its deeper concern is the passage of time and its effect on local residents. MARTIN RISING: Requiem for a King, by Andrea David Pinkney. Illustrated by Brian Pinkney. (Scholastic, $19.99, ages 9 to 12.) A soaring, poetic account of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the last month of his life. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Choice Review
Award-winning science writer Charles Mann brings to life the opposed ideologies of William Vogt (the "prophet") and Norman Borlaug (the "wizard"), two mid-20th-century scientists whose ideas about capitalism, individualism, community, and nature have shaped contemporary notions about humanity's relationship with the planet. Mann proposes observations of, rather than solutions to, the problems related to population growth, such as the availability of food and water and the creation of shelter without endangering the Earth itself. Mann begins by investigating the past, present, and possible future of Homo sapiens, grounding his discussion in biocultural analyses. He then provides a contextual biography for Vogt and Borlaug. At the heart of the book is the discussion of the present and future challenges of the Earth and its resources--land, water, energy, and climate--especially as they relate to human population growth. The text concludes with an exploration of the way Vogtian and Borlaugian thinkers might address the aforementioned challenges as well as the possibility of long-term human survival and success. Eloquent and provocative, Mann's text is an apt examination of market and mindfulness in the context of the human capacity for change and survival. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Helen Doss, Wilbur Wright College, City Colleges of Chicago
Kirkus Review
A dual biography of two significant figures who "had little regard" for each other's work but "were largely responsible for the creation of the basic intellectual blueprints that institutions around the world use today for understanding our environmental dilemmas."A thick book featuring two scientists unknown to most readers is a tough sell, but bestselling journalist and historian Mann (1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, 2011, etc.), a correspondent for the Atlantic, Science, and Wired, turns in his usual masterful performance. Nobel Prize-winning agronomist Norman Borlaug (1914-2009) developed high-yield wheat varieties and championed agricultural techniques that led to the "Green Revolution," vastly increasing world food production. Ornithologist William Vogt (1902-1968) studied the relationship between resources and population and wrote the 1948 bestseller Road to Survival, a founding document of modern environmentalism in which the author maintains that current trends will lead to overpopulation and mass hunger. Borlaug and Vogt represent two sides of a centurylong dispute between what Mann calls "wizards," who believe that science will allow humans to continue prospering, and "prophets," who predict disaster unless we accept that our planet's resources are limited. Beginning with admiring biographies, the author moves on to the environmental challenges the two men symbolize. Agriculture will require a second green revolution by 2050 to feed an estimated 10 billion inhabitants. Only 1 percent of Earth's water is fresh and accessible; three-quarters goes to agriculture, and shortages are already alarming. More than 1.2 billion people still lack electricity; whether to produce more or use less energy bitterly divides both sides. Neither denies that human activities are wreaking havoc with Earth's climate. Mann's most spectacular accomplishment is to take no sides. Readers will thrill to the wizards' astounding advances and believe the prophets' gloomy forecasts, and they will also discover that technological miracles produce nasty side effects and that self-sacrifice, as prophets urge, has proven contrary to human nature.An insightful, highly significant account that makes no predictions but lays out the critical environmental problems already upon us. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Mann (1491) here provides exhaustive, lively analysis of the views about our environment espoused by Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, two relatively unknown 20th-century scientists whose opinions continue to shape current ideas about the future of the planet. Mann's "wizard" is Borlaug, the Nobel Prize-winning agronomist whose patiently bred strains of wheat kicked off the green revolution; his "prophet" is Vogt, whose 1948 Road to Survival is credited with helping birth modern environmentalism. Borlaugians generally believe in the techno-optimistic view that science and technology will eventually help humankind produce a way out of today's environmental difficulties, while Vogtians see the world as bound by irreversible biological limits that will force reduced human consumption. Mann blends extensive bios of these two scientists with their deeply held philosophies on the future of the planet while smartly eschewing his own opinion on which set of solutions he thinks holds most promise for the future. Bronson Pinchot's calm, reassuring narration helps emphasize Mann's decision to raise these large questions that are usually either ignored or skewered in slogans in today's world of chaotic social media. VERDICT An erudite, scholarly approach to important, fundamental views of the future of the planet that will enlighten and inform those concerned about the survival of the next generations. ["A sweeping, provocative work of journalism, history, science, and philosophy. Highly recommended for fans and students of environmental studies, social sciences, and contemporary nonfiction": LJ 1/18 starred review of the Knopf hc.]-Dale Farris, Groves, TX © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
