Average Rating: 
Rating: - A Pleasurable, Interesting Read
I doubt I would have picked up a book called "The Botany of Desire" if not for some very strange circumstances. I needed something to read while waiting in the emergency room, and my best friend gave this book to my wife for her birthday. She's the gardener, and my taste in literature usually runs towards the fictive, but I found myself enjoying "TBOD" in spite of myself.Michael Pollan operates off of an unusual, but simple proposition: that plants have evolved to use human beings as much as we have evolved to use plants. He uses four examples to illustrate his point: the apple (sweetness), the tulip (beauty), marijuana (intoxication), and the potato (control), each plant representing a basic human desire. The way those plants use our desires is evolutionarily a good thing for the plant, allowing them to propagate like mad and become hardier and far more resilient to weather and disease. As some of the other reviewers have noted, "TBOD" is pretty light on the actual science, but the target audience here isn't scientists or those who require heavy amounts of scientific proofs to enjoy a book. It's a prose book, written for people who have little working knowledge of plants or the garden, and I found the historical anecdotes Pollan provided much more entertaining than his actual thesis (which is kind of one of those "well, duh!" things anyway). His deconstruction of the Johnny Appleseed myth (I was born in Central Ohio, and grew up with it, so it was interesting to read the facts) was priceless, as was his treatment of the historical role of flowers and drugs like marijuana. "TBOD" is well-written, and Pollan has a mastery of prose rare in writers these days. His words not only flow off the tongue (or page, if you will), he knows how to craft a sentence and a paragraph to create and enhance the mood of the passage - it's a deft scribbling hand, indeed. If you want a guide on gardening and plant breeding, look elsewhere. If you want a good read about plants historically and evolutionarily speaking, check out "TBOD." Final Grade: B+
Rating:  - Plants Modify Humans
Michael Pollan likes bees, and mentions them frequently in _The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World_ (Random House). "A bumblebee would probably... regard himself as a subject in the garden and the bloom he's plundering for its drop of nectar as an object. But we know that this is just a failure of his imagination. The truth of the matter is that the flower has cleverly manipulated the bee into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom." His thesis in his book is that plants have not manipulated just bees, but humans as well in the ten thousand years since agriculture started. If we have a success with a plant, it is just as true to say that the plant is having a success with us. We may have learned plenty, but the plants have learned as well: make a flashier flower, a tastier tuber and those humans will do just what you want. Pollan examines apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes and finds that we are serving them well.Apples we grow for sweetness, and sweetness surrounds our image of Johnny Appleseed, but Pollan shows that this strange character was not delivering apple orchards to the pioneers as much as he was delivering the alcoholic beverage cider, and incidentally he was making preserves of wild apple trees. Tulips we grow for beauty, and it is a beauty that has driven people wild. Pollan reviews the story of the Tulipomania of seventeenth century Holland, and shows that by what Darwin called "artificial selection," humans chose tulips that looked fancier, and tulips got fancier in order to be chosen. Marijuana we grow for intoxication, and Pollan admires what has happened with it: "_This_ was what the best gardeners of my generation had been doing all these years: they had been underground, perfecting cannabis." The government has boosted the potency of marijuana by forcing growing inside, where even carbon dioxide can be forced into the plants. The strangest and most troubling of the four stories is the potato, which we grow as a staple crop. Pollan got hold of the New Leaf potato from Monsanto, genetically engineered to have a toxin throughout the plant that kills beetles. The problem is that the toxin is behaving differently from natural toxins. Bees take it in pollen to other plants, and we know that monarch butterflies die when they eat milkweed dusted with pollen with the toxin in it; will this happen in the field? Pollan's potatoes grow into fine specimens, needing less worry and care than his other potatoes, but they fail as a harvest; he can't make himself eat them. Pollan is an avid gardener and writes about these plants, all of which he has himself raised at one time or other, with an enjoyable wit and clarity. There is plenty of science packed into his chapters, as well as amusing personal stories and cautionary tales. Most important, his lesson of how plants are not just objects for our manipulation but are linked in pushing us along as we push them provides a vital evolutionary lesson.
Rating: - Conversational prose, brimming with allusions
I just finished this lovely little book,and would highly reccommend it. If nothing else, this book prepares one for many interesting conversations. I am now knowledgable about the true Johnny Appleseed, the tulip craze of Holland, the highly specialized marijuana culture, and new developments in the genetic engineering of potatoes. (To name a few!)
The fact that Pollan is not a scientist, but an avid gardener and researcher, among other things, should be considered an asset to the reader. He avoids esoteric scientific terminology, but the text remains sophisticated because his allusions prove huge amounts of research. Each part of the book, each "desire", has its own special charm. I would be hard pressed to choose a favorite. This book truly opens one's eyes to "a plant's-eye view of the world". Though by no means the be-all-end-all on this topic, it is a beautiful natural history.
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