Tom Philpott of Mother Jones reports:

“In his new book Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future, Bartow J. Elmore has delivered the definitive historical account of a firm with a momentous history and an afterlife that makes it as relevant as ever. An environmental and business historian at Ohio State University, Elmore wrote Seed Money for a non-academic audience—in clear, brisk prose, with an eye for the telling anecdote…”

Seed Money documents in detail Monsanto’s unbridled power and nefarious deeds: “the highly predictable (but denied for years by Monsanto) rise of weeds that evolved to resist Roundup; credible suspicions that Roundup is more toxic than the company originally let on; the deluge of older, even more toxic herbicides deployed in a futile attempt to control those superweeds; and a festering legal dispute over the company’s phosphate mines in Idaho, which have “contaminated soil and groundwater with hazardous chemicals and radioactive constituents,” as the US Environmental Protection Agency has found.”

Read Philpott’s review: What Was Monsanto?