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Mara Hvistendahl

Biography

Mara Hvistendahl

Mara Hvistendahl covered China’s renaissance in science and technology as a correspondent in Shanghai for Science. She has also written for The Atlantic, Popular Science, WIRED and other publications. She is the author of UNNATURAL SELECTION: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A proficient Mandarin speaker and former National Fellow at New America, she lived in China for eight years and now resides in Minneapolis with her family.

Mara Hvistendahl

Books by Mara Hvistendahl

The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espionage
by Mara Hvistendahl - Nonfiction, True Crime

In September 2011, sheriff’s deputies in Iowa encountered three ethnic Chinese men near a field where a farmer was growing corn seed under contract with Monsanto. What began as a simple trespassing inquiry mushroomed into a two-year FBI operation in which investigators bugged the men’s rental cars, used a warrant intended for foreign terrorists and spies, and flew surveillance planes over corn country --- all in the name of protecting trade secrets of corporate giants Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer. Mara Hvistendahl gives a gripping account of this unusually far-reaching investigation, which pitted a veteran FBI special agent against Florida resident Robert Mo, who after his academic career foundered took a questionable job with the Chinese agricultural company DBN --- and became a pawn in a global rivalry.