The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
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- Published by: Random House
- eBook Publish Date: May 31, 2001
- Print ISBN: 0375760393
- Filesize: 777.99 KB
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Overview
In 1637, one Dutchman paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price of a town house in Amsterdam. Three and a half centuries later, Amsterdam is once again the mecca for people who care passionately about one particular plant - thought this time the obsessions revolves around the intoxicating effects of marijuana rather than the visual beauty of the tulip. How could flowers, of all things, become such objects of desire that they can drive men to financial ruin In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. In telling the stories of four familiar plant species that are deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, Pollan illustrates how they evolved to satisfy humankinds's most basic yearnings - and by doing so made themselves indispensable. For, just as we've benefited from these plants, the plants, in the grand co-evolutionary scheme that Pollan evokes so brilliantly, have done well by us.
Editorial Reviews
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. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
Author Information
Bio of Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and the author, most recently, of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, a New York Times best seller. His writing has received numerous awards, including the John Burroughs prize (for the best natural history essay in 1997), the QPB New Vision Award (for his first book, Second Nature), the 2000 Reuters-I.U.C.N. Global Award for Environmental Journalism for his reporting on genetic engineering and the 2003 American Humane Society's Genesis Award for his writing on animal agriculture. The Botany of Desire received the Borders Original Voices Award for the best non-fiction work of 2001, and was recognized as a best book of the year by the American Booksellers Association and Amazon. Beginning in 2003 he will be the Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley. Pollan's previous books are A Place of My Own (1997) and The Botany of Desire (2001). His work is included in many anthologies, including Best American Essays and The Norton Book of Nature Writing. In addition to publishing regularly in the New York Times Magazine, his articles have appeared in Harper's, Vogue, Gourmet, Travel & Leisure, Garden Design, Gardens Illustrated, and House & Garden. Pollan is also a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where he served for many years as Executive Editor. Pollan grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University.
Customer Reviews
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Posted January 11, 2007 by maloney, Ohio
I purchased the book because I have a small orchard and am always looking for new info on apples. All of the information in the book was re hash. The section on biogenetics is trash. Mr. Pollan has this elitist style that is so annoying. I don't know what you would call it...elitist NY Times/NPR ish? The underlying tone here is that all big companies are bad, bla, bla,bla......Christians are idiots, and the best botanists are pot growers How many times does this guy say perhaps?.Perhaps, this.....perhaps, that bla bla bla. Gosh, lets just reflect on that.
Don't waste your money. You can easily find most of the information in the book at your local library without the stupid elitist commentary
Additional Info
Imprint
Random House
Filesize
777.99 KB
Number of Pages
304
eBook ISBN
9781588360083
Awards
- Book Sense Book of the Year
- Connecticut Book Awards
- Natural World Book Prize
- Original Voices Award
Excerpt from: The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Chapter 1
Desire: Sweetness
Plant: The Apple
(Malus domestica)
If you happened to find yourself on the banks of the Ohio River on a particular afternoon in the spring of 1806 ' somewhere just to the north of Wheeling, West Virginia, say ' you would probably have noticed a strange makeshift craft drifting lazily down the river. At the time, this particular stretch of the Ohio, wide and brown and bounded on both sides by steep shoulders of land thick with oaks and hickories, fairly boiled with river traffic, as a ramshackle armada of keelboats and barges ferried settlers from the comparative civilization of Pennsylvania to the wilderness of the Northwest Territory.
The peculiar craft you ' d have caught sight of that afternoon consisted of a pair of hollowed-out logs that had been lashed together to form a rough catamaran, a sort of canoe plus sidecar. In one of the dugouts lounged the figure of a skinny man of about thirty, who may or may not have been wearing a burlap coffee sack for a shirt and a tin pot for a hat. According to the man in Jefferson County who deemed the scene worth recording, the fellow in the canoe appeared to be snoozing without a care in the world, evidently trusting in the river to take him wherever it was he wanted to go. The other hull, his sidecar, was riding low in the water under the weight of a small mountain of seeds that had been carefully blanketed with moss and mud to keep them from drying out in the sun.
The fellow snoozing in the canoe was John Chapman, already well known to people in Ohio by his nickname: Johnny Appleseed. He was on his way to Marietta, where the Muskingum River pokes a big hole into the Ohio ' s northern bank, pointing straight into the heart of the Northwest Territory. Chapman ' s plan was to plant a tree nursery along one of that river ' s as-yet-unsettled tributaries, which drain the fertile, thickly forested hills of central Ohio as far north as Mansfield. In all likelihood, Chapman was coming from Allegheny County in western Pennsylvania, to which he returned each year to collect apple seeds, separating them out from the fragrant mounds of pomace that rose by the back door of every cider mill. A single bushel of apple seeds would have been enough to plant more than three hundred thousand trees; there ' s no way of telling how many bushels of seed Chapman had in tow that day, but it ' s safe to say his catamaran was bearing several whole orchards into the wilderness.
The image of John Chapman and his heap of apple seeds riding together down the Ohio has stayed with me since I first came across it a few years ago in an out-of-print biography. The scene, for me, has the resonance of myth ' a myth about how plants and people learned to use each other, each doing for the other things they could not do for themselves, in the bargain changing each other and improving their common lot.
Henry David Thoreau once wrote that ' it is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man, ' and much of the American chapter of that story can be teased out of Chapman ' s story. It ' s the story of how pioneers like him helped domesticate the frontier by seeding it with Old World plants. ' Exotics, ' we ' re apt to call these species today in disparagement, yet without them the American wilderness might never have become a home. What did the apple get in return A golden age: untold new varieties and half a world of new habitat.
