A Planet in Peril
THE WIZARD AND THE PROPHET: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World
BY CHARLES C. MANN
Knopf, 640 pp., $28.95
ONE OF THE PLEASURES of reading Charles C. Mann’s new book, is the simple pleasure of learning. Mann knows things about the world, lots of things, and if you spend time with him, you will come to know things, too. In this particular book, he introduces us to Norman Borlaug, an agricultural scientist who in 1970 won the Nobel Prize for fathering the Green Revolution that helped feed millions of people around the world, and William Vogt, who Mann claims is the “principal founder” of modern environmentalism. Mann writes about Borlaug and Vogt both as human beings and as symbols of