The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Book Review: Mind-altering book!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book will change forever the way that you look at plants, and, in particular, those plants we have "domesticated" as our favorites. Michael Pollan has the gift of a fantastic storyteller and the imagination to see our relationship to plants in a novel way. He has thoroughly investigated the fascinating histories of four useful and familiar plant groups, ones you thought you already knew plenty about. Prepare to learn more!Book Review: I desire botany
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is fantastic. It lets you appreciate the world from another point of view that you wouldnt normally think about. It makes you want to enjoy life even more. So get out there and enjoy all of lifes simple pleasures because they have been comming 4.5 billion years in the making. They are better than ever before today, and even better tomorrow. Who knows what the future holds. Some sort of super flower that we can eat, enjoy the beauty of, and smoke I would gather... but I doubt it in our lifetime.... soon though :).Book Review: Great read for everyone
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this book a few years ago by accident, lucky me! The information contained in thei book was fascinating. Who would have thought so much of a potato? Book Review: Another Great Book by Pollan
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently finished Botany of Desire and Pollan's more recent Omnivore's Dilemma. Both books are full of great factual information about what we eat, the implications of doing such, and the forces of nature that bind us tightly with other plants and animals. I loved both of these books. It opened my eyes to so many things that were both enlightening and, at times, frightening. Even though the content of both books is full of factual information, Pollan communicates it in a fashion that makes for an enjoyable read. I suggest getting them both.Book Review: Animistically Delicious
Summary: 5 Stars
The aptly-named Pollan is a delicious writer, and in this book he calls into question our long-standing assumption that human consciousness allows us to be the only species which imposes our will onto other beings. Using four examples - the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato - he describes how the widespread planting of certain crops over others may have come through the plants' volition as much as through human choice. He points out that plants use animal desires to their own benefit: for example, the bumblebee chooses certain flowers over others precisely because those flowers have evolved to please bumblebees. Therefore, contrary to our initial interpretation, the bee is actually being used by the plant. Similarly, Pollan argues, humans choose certain plants to fulfill our desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control - and plants like the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato have co-evolved to best exploit these desires. So who is using whom? In an exquisite animistic introduction, Pollan points this out:
"We're prone to overestimate our own agency in nature. ... but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That's why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did as a way to conquer the trees." (p. xxi)
Pollan's writing is anything but dry. In the opening chapter, he discusses the forces by which apples spread in terms which read like a detective novel. He first reveals that apple trees never repeat their predecessors' genetic templates; in their case, ontogeny does not replicate phylogeny. In fact, every single seed will grow to become its own unique being, supremely adaptable to, and largely created by, its surroundings. All of the commercial apples we enjoy now, those with names like Jonathan or Golden Delicious, grow on cloned graftings from an original individual tree. Apple trees are therefore one glorious example of nature's continual wild experimentation.
The chapter then goes into the history of Johnny Appleseed, a major force by which apples spread across a new continent. It seems that the main vision we Americans hold of Appleseed, that of a happy-go-lucky barefoot eco-freak merrily planting seeds hither and yon for a wholesome farmer populace to enjoy a fresh apple pie after a hard day's work, is only part of the story. Actually, Pollan reveals, those early apples were not soft or sweet at all, and the only reason the folk of the harsh interior wanted them was for their capacity to be fermented into hard alcoholic cider! The mystically-inclined Appleseed is then likened to an American Dionysus, in wonderfully funny language: "He was a kind of satyr without the sex - a Protestant satyr, you might say..." (p.35).
The Botany of Desire calls into question centuries of assumptions about the dominance of human consciousness and the locus of ecological control. It illustrates important and timely ideas concerning an animistic, volitional-reciprocity worldview through rigorous botanical and historical investigation, all wrapped up in a journalist's engaging writing style. Go read it, and then feed it to your friends. Who knows what might grow?
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