Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)American pests is the first book (at least that I am aware of) for popular consumption on the history of plant pest/insect eradication in the USA. I suppose that this topic does not sound like fun to most people. Nevertheless, for me it is an interesting subject, and if you consider how plant pests affect the price and quality of food, as well as their ability to spread disease, then bug control may begin to sound more worthwhile as something to read about.
The book begins with Colonial America through to the present(almost). The book haphazardly jumps through American history, with no clear breaks. The chapter headings often have little to do with chronology, and are rather broken off arbitrarily. The writing is at times terse, and at times focuses on the mundane. Providing details is fine, but why so randomly? It is no surprise that this book was published by a university printing house, as I feel that a more mainstream publisher would have forced dramatic changes in the book (assuming they'd print something on this topic in any situation). The author is an academic historian, and the book appears at times more for the consumption of historians than the popular reader.
The coverage is also uneven. The post-WWII years are not really covered much. Shockingly, the GMO situation is not mentioned.
In the end, this book really could have used a better editor (I don't know if it had one at all this time), and it needed to be another 100 pages or so longer to be thorough enough. For lack of a better alternative, I recommend this book to anyone interested in this subject.
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