The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World 1st Edition by Michael Pollan (PDF)

Description

The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author of Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most trusted food experts in AmericaIn 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—though 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. The sweetness of apples, for example, induced the early Americans to spread the species, giving the tree a whole new continent in which to blossom. So who is really domesticating whom? Weaving fascinating anecdotes and accessible science into gorgeous prose, Pollan takes us on an absorbing journey that will change the way we think about our place in nature.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Thanks to a bit of trans-generational intellectual “pollination,” via the son of a friend from Atlanta who once owned a restaurant and had a passion for food, I was introduced to Michael Pollan’s work “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” a decade ago, which I have read and reviewed on Amazon. Most regrettably, I had not read a second of his works until now. The man has a lot to say; and says it all too well. It is a case of “all the news NOT repeating itself,” to invert one of John Prine’s laments.“The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” published in 2007, is subtitled: “A Natural History of Four Meals.” The number “four” is also operative in “The Botany of Desire,” which was published in 2002. It is the story of four plants: apples, tulips, cannabis and potatoes. Reflecting the theme of the title, there are four human desires that are associated with these plants: sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control, respectively.Early in the book Pollan teasingly throws out the idea that perhaps the classic view: “People cultivate plants” should be inverted. For sure, Pollan does not fall off some “New Age talk-to-the-plants” cliff (and they will talk back) but posits a sound argument that without a conscious effort, plants evolve to utilize humans and animals to make up for their lack of mobility. His introduction is entitled: “The Human Bumblebee.”Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan) means “father of the apple.” From the surrounding area the apple spread throughout the world, in part, aided by John Chapman, an American folklore hero more famously called: “Johnny Appleseed.” Pollan traveled to eastern Ohio, which, in 1806, was once the American frontier, and attempted to sort out the man from the myth, providing many an illuminating insight. Among those insights: apples were planted not for eating, but for drinking… in fermented form, and it was Prohibition that forced the apple growers to concoct the marketing slogan: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”Tulips originated in Turkey. An Austrian Ambassador to the Court of Suleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople served as the “bumblebee” in this case, bringing tulip bulbs back to Europe, where they spread to Holland and fueled one of the more famous financial “bubbles,” ironically among normally staid Calvinists, in the 17th Century. A “holy grail” among tulip cultivators is a black tulip since black occurs so infrequently in the living plant world. The grail is still elusive but Pollan is proud of his dark maroon one.Cannabis is associated with the desire for intoxication. Hidden in plain sight, as Pollan says, is the chronic problem with mind-altering substances that are abused: “toxic.” Pollan provides a brilliant exposition on this perennial flashpoint of America’s cultural wars. Anslinger, and “Reefer Madness” make the obligatory cameo appearance. Much more instructive was the update from the ‘60’s, in terms of how marijuana is raised and cultivated in the United States, and the pendulum swinging back and forth towards legalization (written in 2002, he does not anticipate its legalization in neighboring Colorado, or a handful of other states). He has justified concerns about the two “errant” plants in his backyard, noting under federal asset forfeiture laws that if a case was brought: “The People of Connecticut v. Michael Pollan’s Garden”, his land could become the property of the New Milford Police Department. Pollan introduced me to Raphael Mechoulam, an Israeli scientist who isolated the chemically active component: THC. The author provides a BRILLIANT description of “plain-ol’” vanilla ice cream as experienced in an altered state of consciousness, and questions whether, chemically there is a difference between the chemically-aided version and that induced by meditation, fasting, and other methods. Indeed, there is a “sense of wonder,” as Pollan says, about seeing things fresh and anew, as a child might, that can make a trip worthwhile, so all the news does not repeat itself.Potatoes are the subject of the last chapter, starting their journey from their historic epicenter high in the Andes and brought back to Europe by the conquering Spaniards. They may have been introduced into Ireland by a shipwreck from the Spanish armada in 1588, providing a godsend to a starving people where other crops would not readily grow. A “godsend” until the famine of the 1840’s caused a reduction by half of Ireland’s population (through starvation and emigration). The dangers of an agricultural “monoculture.” Pollan visits the headquarters of Monsanto in St. Louis, which is doing so much to introduce the entire world to the “intellectual property” of patented genes and seeds and goes off to Idaho to describe its implementation.Indicative of Pollan’s outlook and writing style is the following quote concerning his visit to the St. Louis Monsanto headquarters, and his meeting with Dave Hjelle, the company’s director of regulatory affairs: “Dave Hjelle is a disarmingly candid man, and before we finished our lunch he uttered two words that I never thought I’d hear for the lips of a corporate executive, except perhaps in a bad movie. I’d assumed these two words had been scrupulously expunged from the corporate vocabulary many years ago, during a previous paradigm long since discredited, but Dave Hjelle proved me wrong: ‘TRUST US’.”To see anew, and act anew, and the catalyst can come from a book: 6-stars for Pollan’s many, many fine insights.

⭐Michael Pollan delivers four witty and thoughtful narratives on how plants satisfy the human desires of sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control. In the end, you will wonder who is really in charge, plant or person. Who domesticated who? A superb read for anyone interested in the coevolution of plants and humans.

⭐I found this last minute in an airport about to catch a flight. This is full of information about certain plants we all know well. Chapter 1 was about apples and is worth buying the book just for this. Potatoes and marijuana also very interesting as well.Did you know Johnny Appleseed was a real man who was probably responsible for infinate mutations and permutations of apple varieties in the pursuit of selling apple orchards to settlers for cider?Highly reccomended.

⭐The chapters are interesting but very long winded and the narrative twists and turns without as much botany as expected.

⭐First of all, if you have never read any of Michael Pollan’s books, you are missing out. I would suggest reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma first, but this book is very good also. It is a look at how instead of us conquering and “domesticating” four kinds of plants, they have in fact figured out how to use us to propagate their species. The section on apples is my favorite because it seems like this plant completely reinvented itself just so we would enjoy it and spread it around. I have only two problems with this book. First, the section on marijuana is a little scattered as Pollan begins to describe what the plant does to our mind, then descends into a rambling discussion on the importance of forgetting and the meaning of wonder. Not necessarily bad writing, but not really focused on plants, either.My second problem is that while the first three sections do for the most part focus on the plants, the potato section is mostly an indictment of Monsanto, the seed company. While this is a company with plenty of demons to expose, the section could have been very interesting if it focused on the potato’s evolution and transformations from noxious root to staple food. You get the feeling Pollan was just waiting to tee off on Monsanto and went off on a tangent. All that being said, it is a very good book about a most interesting and unique topic. I have never thought about the “plant’s-eye view,” as Pollan says. He is a gifted writer who can make the strangest and most obscure topics exciting and interesting. Throughout his books you just stop after reading something and wonder at it. He tells of a plant that has evolved spots that appear to be a female bee’s backside so that male bees plow into it, getting coated with pollen. Becoming frustrated, they do this multiple times to many different flowers and spread the pollen around. How amazing is that? A plant figuring out what the backside of an insect looks like. A year ago, I cared not one whit about plants, but now Pollan is one of my favorite writers.

⭐This is the second book by Michael Pollan that I’ve read within a week (the excellent In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating: An Eater’s Manifesto being the other)He has the most magical, open mind; the ability to take the everyday and look at it like a true artist – thus forcing the reader to look anew at his/her own everyday.Here, he looks at four plant species whose development and spread has been closely linked with Homo sapiens – the apple, the tulip, the cannabis plant and the potato, and considers the evolutionary advantage from the plant perspective. The book uncovers history, folk-law, economics, politics and much more.Pollan delivers much fascinating information and has the lightest and most passionately engaged of writing styles. He is a wonderful raconteur. I read this book with a wider and wider smile, thoroughly delighted and enchanted.This book reminded me in many ways of

⭐Anatomy of a Rose: The Secret Life of Flowers

⭐by Sharman Apt Russell. Both authors have the ability to be fascinatingly informative whilst simultanously managing charm, entertainment, profound thought and beauty.Both effortlessly illustrate Blake’s:To see a world in a grain of sandAnd A heaven In a Wild FlowerHold Infinity In the Palm of Your HandAnd eternity in an hourThey are writers who can take the mundane, and open it to deep meaning, philosophical complexity and educationA small factual teaser from the tulip section – the most prized and valuable tulips were those variegated by fine filagrees of crimson patterning upon the primary colour base. But this was caused by the presence of a virus, so over time, plants grown from bulblets broken off from the ‘parent’ bulb would grow weaker and weaker – so increasing the rarity and fabulous cost of the prized variety. The evolutionary gainer from mans’ ‘meddling’, not the tulip, but the virus, which we disseminated!

⭐I picked up this book from the library at my university. I kept having the extend the loan of the book because i never wanted to give it back. However, I took it back and bought one of my own i was enjoying it that much. Pollan is clearly a beautiful writer, with encapsulating expressions and way of describing things. I built a great awareness of Pollan as a person, as a gardener, as well as his and other speculations of certain plants. It is one of the best books ive read in a very, very long time. I actually read the whole thing, which is a first for me with books!Definitely recommend this to anyone.

⭐This book is very interesting, but does not live up to its description. If you want to find out a lot about the history in the US of potatoes, tulips, apples, cannabis then go for it

⭐I really loved reading this book… Lots of interesting points and it was fun to discover things I didn’t know about such well known plants. I enjoyed the narration, personal and humerous at times!

⭐Interesting and informative book – thanks for sending another copy – very good service from this seller – thank you !

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