Paperback, 297 pages
English language
Published May 27, 2002 by Random House Trade Paperbacks.
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?
The conceit - are plants using us more effectively than we use them? - still works over 20 years later. The stories still feel relevant even if they have since taken some unexpected turns. An interesting contrast to Camille Dungy's "Soil", but as a non-gardener they both have my admiration.
Pollan is undoubtedly a gifted writer. There is a a sort of lightness to his writing, even when he writes about heavy things (like Montsanto or the Irish Potato Famine). In Botany of Desire he examines the complex relationship between Man and 4 other classes of organisms: Apples, tulips, ganja and potatoes. He's a good tales-teller and it's never boring with him. To sum the experience of reading this book I would say that I enjoyed most of his ideas about gardening and co-evolution, pagan nature-worship and genetic engineering (even though some were not as brilliant as others), and that it's a great book for amateur botanists.
At the end of the Epilogue he suggests that man and nature are in the boat together.
I believe we are, But I suspect nature is the better swimmer.
A bunch of liberals venting over greed corporations and politics. We need to get some Republicans to come to get a different viewpoint.
