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Plants are no strangers to desire. They learned long ago to play on the desires of other species to fulfill their greatest longing -- propagating themselves. So naturally, humans find themselves turned on by certain plants, and with domestication they have learned to enhance the very qualities that drew them to a particular plant in the first place. Science writer and gardener Michael Pollan tells of four plants and their associated desires -- apples for sweetness; tulips for beauty; marijuana for intoxication; and potatoes for control -- in this very personal and wonderfully written book.
Burkhard Bilger
[Pollan] has a wide-ranging intellect, an eager grasp of evolutionary biology and a subversive streak that helps him root out some wonderfully counterintuitive points. His prose both shimmers and snaps, and he has a knack for finding perfect quotes in the oddest places (George Eliot is somehow made to speak for the sense-attenuating value of a good high). Best of all, Pollan really loves plants. His first book described his education as a gardener, and that hands-and-knees experience animates every one of his descriptions -- whether of hydroponic marijuana (''I don't think I've ever seen plants that looked more enthusiastic'') or of roses (''flung open and ravishing in Elizabethan times, obligingly buttoned . . . up and turned prim for the Victorians.'').
New York Times Book Review
Los Angeles Times
A whimsical, literary romp through man's perpetually frustrating and always unpredictable relationship with nature.
Entertainment Weekly
We can give no higher praise to the work of this superb science writer/ reporter than to say that his new book is as exciting as any you'll read.
New York Times Book Review
[Pollan] has a wide-ranging intellect, an eager grasp of evolutionary biology and a subversive streak that helps him to root out some wonderfully counterintuitive points. His prose both shimmers and snaps, and he has a knack for finding perfect quotes in the oddest places.... Best of all, Pollan really loves plants.
New York Times
Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as on our implication in the natural world.
New Yorker
A wry, informed pastoral.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Erudite, engaging and highly original, journalist Pollan's fascinating account of four everyday plants and their coevolution with human society challenges traditional views about humans and nature. Using the histories of apples, tulips, potatoes and cannabis to illustrate the complex, reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world, he shows how these species have successfully exploited human desires to flourish. "It makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees," Pollan writes as he seamlessly weaves little-known facts, historical events and even a few amusing personal anecdotes to tell each species' story. For instance, he describes how the apple's sweetness and the appeal of hard cider enticed settlers to plant orchards throughout the American colonies, vastly expanding the plant's range. He evokes the tulip craze of 17th-century Amsterdam, where the flower's beauty led to a frenzy of speculative trading, and explores the intoxicating appeal of marijuana by talking to scientists, perusing literature and even visiting a modern marijuana garden in Amsterdam. Finally, he considers how the potato plant demonstrates man's age-old desire to control nature, leading to modern agribusiness's experiments with biotechnology. Pollan's clear, elegant style enlivens even his most scientific material, and his wide-ranging references and charming manner do much to support his basic contention that man and nature are and will always be "in this boat together." (May) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Plants are important to us for many reasons. Pollan, an editor and contributor to Harper's and the New York Times Magazine and author of Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, muses on our complex relationships with them, using the examples of the apple, the tulip, the marijuana plant, and the potato. He weaves disparate threads from personal, scientific, literary, historical, and philosophical sources into an intriguing and somehow coherent narrative. Thus, he portrays Johnny Appleseed as an important force in adapting apple trees to a foreign climate but also a Dionysian figure purveying alcohol to settlers; tulips as ideals of beauty that brought about disaster to a Turkish sultan and Dutch investors; marijuana as a much desired drug related to a natural brain chemical that helps us forget as well as a bonanza for scientific cultivators; and the potato, a crop once vilified as un-Christian, as the cause of the Irish famine and finally an example of the dangers of modern chemical-intense, genetically modified agriculture. These essays will appeal to those with a wide range of interests. Recommended for all types of libraries. [For more on the tulip, see Anna Pavord's The Tulip (LJ 3/1/99) and Mike Dash's Tuplipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused (LJ 3/1/00). Ed.] Marit S. Taylor, Auraria Lib., Denver Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
From the Publisher
Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as on our implication in the natural world.” —The New York Times
“[Pollan] has a wide-ranging intellect, an eager grasp of evolutionary biology and a subversive streak that helps him to root out some wonderfully counterintuitive points. His prose both shimmers and snaps, and he has a knack for finding perfect quotes in the oddest places. . . . Best of all, Pollan really loves plants.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A wry, informed pastoral.” —The New Yorker
“We can give no higher praise to the work of this superb science writer/ reporter than to say that his new book is as exciting as any you’ll read.” —Entertainment Weekly
“A whimsical, literary romp through man’s perpetually frustrating and always unpredictable relationship with nature.” —Los Angeles Times
AUG/SEP 06 - AudioFile
The autobiographies of four plants--a fruit (the apple), a flower (the tulip), a drug plant (cannabis), and a staple food (the potato)--will delight listeners with stories of greed, starvation, riches, and disaster. Who would know that Johnny Appleseed’s success was because his apples were being used to make alcohol rather than pies, or that Dutch fortunes were made and lost with a unique tulip bulb? Scott Brick uses his skill with expression and tonal changes to make scientific information go down like the medicine with a spoonful of honey. He capitalizes on the author’s casual style--the writer admits he smokes pot--to produce an audible intoxication. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine