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The Botany Of Desire: A Plant's Eye View Of The World - Community Reviews back

by Michael Pollan
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FatherCraneMadeMeDoIt
FatherCraneMadeMeDoIt rated it 6 years ago
For more reviews, check out my blog: Craft-CycleA fascinating read with a very unique perspective. I really liked that Pollan looked at evolution from the plant's perspective. It was so simple, yet so novel and interesting. I especially enjoyed the chapters on apples and potatoes.There is a lot of i...
Bettie's Books
Bettie's Books rated it 9 years ago
bookshelves: autumn-2015, gardening, nonfic-nov-2015, sciences, tbr-busting-2015, nature, teh-demon-booze, philosophy, religion, us-ohio, recreational-drugs, published-2001, history, north-americas, nonfiction Read from April 03, 2013 to November 19, 2015 Description: Every schoolchild learns a...
nouveau
nouveau rated it 11 years ago
Pollan... heheh, surely that can't be a coincidence... anyway Pollan covers four plants: apples, tulips, cannabis, and potatoes. Apples covers Johnny Appleseed and Kazakhstan, tulips the Dutch tulip bubble; cannabis; potatoesend result:apples 5/5tulips 4/5cannabis 5/5potatoes 3/5average: 4。25nice, i...
katiewilkins186
katiewilkins186 rated it 12 years ago
The author’s starting premise in The Botany of Desire has two fascinating parts. First, that plants benefit greatly from domestication, so our relationship with them could just as easily be viewed as them domesticating us. And second, that domesticated plants have evolved to meet some basic human de...
Literary Sara
Literary Sara rated it 12 years ago
Writing is not Michael Pollan's strong suit. It took me several weeks of subway reading to slog through this short collection of essays.But the thesis is interesting--Pollan recasts the relationship between plants and humans as a symbiotic one, in which people do not so much domesticate plants as fa...
Cassandra Reads
Cassandra Reads rated it 12 years ago
I'm not sure I'm ever going to eat potatoes again! I'll think of that part of this book every time I want a potato. In some way, that's all I've gotten from this book. It was good overall, but that's the one thing I'm going to remember from this book. Like the corn people in Pollan's The Omnivore's ...
JasonKoivu
JasonKoivu rated it 13 years ago
I love books that open my eyes, teach me something, and even go so far as to re-educate me on the fallacies foisted upon me by ill-informed grammar school teachers. To that last end, I found the chapter on Johnny Appleseed very enlightening as well as highly entertaining. Pollan is more humorous and...
A Man With An Agenda
A Man With An Agenda rated it 13 years ago
Apples. Tulips. Marijuana. Potatoes.Third subject aside, I didn't see how these topics could be at all provocative. But then of course I'd forgotten about Tulipomania and the Great Potato Famine, the former being a bizarre highlight in world history, and I had never guessed at how intricate the stor...
UNICORN PORN FOR ALL
UNICORN PORN FOR ALL rated it 14 years ago
Pollan represents one of my favorite types of writers: modern polymaths who can bring scientific, historic and literary knowledge to bear on whatever they're writing about. When it's done well, I don't care what the question is; for instance, tulips aren't really my thing, despite their presence on...
Listening to the Silence
Listening to the Silence rated it 15 years ago
In his usual fashion, Michael Pollan has taken a topic that many of us take for granted - in this case vegetation and it's relationship to man - and turned it on it's head. In the Botany of Desire, Pollan sets out to explain the history of plant evolution, how co-evolution works, and how the desire...
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