Reviewed by: The Chemical Age: How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth by Frank A. von Hippel Peter Thompson (bio) The Chemical Age: How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth By Frank A. von Hippel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. xiii + 389. For historians of technology, Frank A. von Hippel's new book, The Chemical Age, will likely prove difficult to categorize. Based on its title and its introductory structure, the book should fit within the recent spate of works that have, in light of contemporary environmental concerns, attempted to renarrativize modernity through historical examinations of both the materials and infrastructures of industrialized chemistry. A small selection of such works includes David Vail's Chemical Lands (University of Alabama Press, 2018); Ernst Homburg and Elisabeth Vaupel's Hazardous Chemicals (Berghahn, 2019); and Soraya Boudia et al.'s article entitled "Residues: Rethinking Chemical Environments" (Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 2018). In contrast to these works, however, The Chemical Age provides a hazy rationale for its quadripartite structure that maintains thematic sections on famine, plague, war, and ecology. This reader was led to suspect that the book's early chapters were largely derived from a 1962 Monsanto Corporation advertisement (p. 271), in which the company attempted to quiet American fears of widespread organochloride pesticide use by recounting the greater dangers of historical plagues and famines. Thus, The Chemical [End Page 902] Age begins with a chapter on the Great Famine in Ireland, followed by a deep history of malaria, a study of yellow fever that is largely based in nineteenth-century America, and an examination of the early twentieth-century attempts to pinpoint the vectors of typhus and bubonic plague. In these chapters, von Hippel displays a clear writing style that provides useful overviews of various scientific studies of pathogens and pests. At the same time, the author relies heavily on English-language sources and presents the reader with a fairly triumphant Anglo-American story of scientific discovery that breaks no new ground. After the first five chapters, von Hippel finally arrives at the book's foundational stories. He begins Chapter 6 by describing the scientific competition between German chemists Walther Nernst and Fritz Haber. Nernst and Haber's rivalry is used to explain the latter's patenting of an artificial nitrogen fixation process and the integration of his work into German military endeavors during World War I. Most notably, von Hippel covers Haber's development of poison gas for use against both enemy soldiers and the insects that plagued the German army. The book then creates a bifurcated German-American story of synthesized pesticides. In Germany, Haber's work on poison gas led to the development of the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon-B, which would later be used by the Nazis in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Further pesticide research in the German-speaking world produced both highly deadly nerve gases and the organochlorine pesticide DDT, which then took hold in the growing post–World War II American consumer market. Unfortunately, The Chemical Age glosses over the complicated politics of fear and anxiety that mobilized both of these national stories in the interwar years. Nevertheless, these middle chapters provide some interesting anecdotal insight into the lives of Fritz Haber, Walther Nernst, and the many promising young chemists and physicists who surrounded them. This is because von Hippel is the great-grandson of James Franck, a Nobel-winning physicist who worked on both Haber's poison gas program and the Manhattan Project, a personal connection that is revealed in the epilogue. The final three chapters cover mid-century American concerns over synthesized pesticides, Rachel Carson's publication of Silent Spring in 1962, and the subsequent public battles over scientific expertise and environmental ethics. The book is highly sympathetic to Carson and ends with a message of compromise. In a contemporary moment in which environmental concerns have become increasingly pressing, von Hippel does not reject outright future synthetic pest control technologies that could potentially improve human living conditions. Rather, he advocates for a scientific humility that can assist grassroots organizations to reign in corporate...