| In BIG COTTON: How A
Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations
and Put America on the Map (Viking On
Sale: January 3, 2005; $24.95; 398 pages)
author Stephen Yafa explores the extraordinary
range of imagination and ingenuity required
to convert a fluffy mass of fiber into a substance
of unbelievable versatility. He traces cotton's
journey from its first domestication about
5,500 years ago in Asia, Africa, and South
America, through the conflicts that led to
the American Civil War, and finally examines
its role nano-technology and bio-engineering-hot
button topics in today's global economy. Yafa
reveals to us how cotton has dictated the
economy, carved the environmental state, and
been a key player in international relations
for thousands of years.
No legal plant on earth has killed more
people by virtue of the acrimony and avarice
it provokes than cotton. In the American
South, cotton production enslaved generations
of Africans, and then ignited the American
Civil War, which sent more American men
to their deaths than all other wars combined.
Thousands of orphaned English children in
nineteenth century Manchester worked in
squalid, filthy textile factories manufacturing
cotton into cloth. In the twentieth century,
cotton cultivated a lethal environment by
being one of the world's more persistent
and heaviest users of toxic pesticides.
Cotton, too, has been responsible for economic
disasters as rivers are diverted to irrigate
cotton crops and vast expanses of fauna
and flora are replaced by cotton fields.
At the other extreme, cotton manufacturing
inspired innovations and inventions responsible
for transforming eighteenth-century England
into the world's greatest industrial power,
and then spurring the new American democracy
to become an economic equal among giants.
After Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin,
and acres of cotton fields erupted throughout
the South, our new nation suddenly owned
a crucial piece of international trade;
cotton added the economic muscle needed
to achieve true independence.
Whether you find the story of cotton to
be a tribute to man's ability to succeed
or a cautionary tale, BIG COTTON makes you
reconsider how we got where we are through
a most surprising historical vehicle.
About the Author: Stephen Yafa is a novelist,
playwright, and produced screenwriter. He
has written for Playboy, Details, Rolling
Stone, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
He lives in California with his wife, and
has three grown children. Big Cotton is
his first book of nonfiction.
For more information or to arrange an
interview, please contact Holly Watson at
310.390.0591 or via email at Holly.Watson@us.penguingroup.com
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