The Botany of Desire - Michael Pollan.epub

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed
a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?

“Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as 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

“Until I read Michael Pollan’s original, provocative and charming The Botany of Desire, I had never managed to get inside the soul of a plant. Mr. Pollan, an accomplished gardener and garden writer, presents a plant’s-eye view of the world that challenged some of my most basic assumptions about gardening, particularly the one about whether I control my lilies or they control me. Mr. Pollan disabused me of my anthropocentric ignorance. In his elegant sections on marijuana and potatoes, Mr. Pollan braids together cosmic ideas, conversations with experts and day-to-day reports from his own garden. Mr. Pollan’s discussion of the genetically engineered NewLeaf potato, which was devised to resist its most dreaded enemy, the Colorado potato beetle, is a lucid and balanced assessment of this new horticultural technology, a subject too often tackled with barely muffled hysteria.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“A don’t-wanna-put-it-down unspooling of the socio-political, economic and historical forces that led to the cultivation of four crops. Pollan is a master at making connections, seeing the lines that connect disparate dots in the complexities of the garden, be they of a political, literary, historical, socioeconomic or, even, sexual realm.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Funny, interesting and as delicious as a slice of summer peach … a must for people who like a good story.”
—New York Daily News