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Loading... The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the Worldby Michael Pollan
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I first picked up this book at my uncle Spence's house while Elisa was giving French lessons to his wife and daughters. It's a brilliant book with a really compelling premise. Pollan asks us to imagine that four plants have proven evolutionarily successful because they have adapted themselves to particular emotional or aesthetic tendencies of human beings. He chooses four plants: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato, and equates each with a basic human emotion. Really great writing, a fusion of smart thinking, sensitivity to metaphor, mythbusting, historical awareness, and scientific acuity. A great, fun read that informs without preaching to or stultifying you as you read. ( )Excellent condition gets off to a great start. Focusing on apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes, Pollan looks at plant domestication and how plants have exploited human needs to flourish as much as how humans have used the plants for their own ends. I LOVED this book; it made me a Michael Pollan fan for life. Through it, he totally convinced me that it is the plants that are curing, tending to, and raising us, rather than the other way around. He gives plants a mind and motivation of their own (mainly that of reproduction) and shatters a couple of misconceptions along the way as well. My personal favorite myth busting? The story of Johnny Appleseed. His true biopic has no place in the shelves of a Disney library... It's hard for a book about evolutionary biology to be entertaining, but this one really is. The prose is brilliant, the humor is wry, and you get the impression the author spends a lot of time in his garden, both in frustration and awe.
In other words, human desire shapes the plants that then shape human desire. In displaying for us, in his graceful and literate way, the intricacies of the mechanisms involved, Mr. Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as on our implication in the natural world. It's an absorbing subject, and Pollan, like his hero, brings a clutch of quirky talents to the task of exploring it. He 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.
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In making his point, Pollan focuses on the relationship between humans and four specific plants: apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes. He uses the history of John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) to illustrate how both the apple's sweetness and its role in the production of alcoholic cider made it appealing to settlers moving west, thus greatly expanding the plant's range. He also explains how human manipulation of the plant has weakened it, so that "modern apples require more pesticide than any other food crop." The tulipomania of 17th-century Holland is a backdrop for his examination of the role the tulip's beauty played in wildly influencing human behavior to both the benefit and detriment of the plant (the markings that made the tulip so attractive to the Dutch were actually caused by a virus). His excellent discussion of the potato combines a history of the plant with a prime example of how biotechnology is changing our relationship to nature. As part of his research, Pollan visited the Monsanto company headquarters and planted some of their NewLeaf brand potatoes in his garden--seeds that had been genetically engineered to produce their own insecticide. Though they worked as advertised, he made some startling discoveries, primarily that the NewLeaf plants themselves are registered as a pesticide by the EPA and that federal law prohibits anyone from reaping more than one crop per seed packet. And in a interesting aside, he explains how a global desire for consistently perfect French fries contributes to both damaging monoculture and the genetic engineering necessary to support it.
Pollan has read widely on the subject and elegantly combines literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific references with engaging anecdotes, giving readers much to ponder while weeding their gardens. --Shawn Carkonen
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:53 -0400)
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