The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

Michael Pollan

Jun 2001 · Sold by Random House

About this ebook

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 America

In 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.

Ratings and reviews

Boring, says the geologist. My teacher wanted us to read it for a soils class, and think this was the worst idea ever. Dude talks about Johnny Appleseed endlessly......and doesn't even match his opening theory. I really don't think I'm going to finish this book because I find it so boring. And this is coming from someone who enjoys reading geology books, enough said!

Good writing style, but it got old after the first two chapters. It was a bit sing-songy when straight prose would have sufficed. The concept of the novel is fantastic, though I had a hard time ascribing agency to a plant. The question could be, of course, how much agency do we have in our own evolution?

I enjoyed the personable tone, the historical curiosity and passion with which Pollan wrote. The are still aspects of these stories that have stuck with me, years later. I definitely grew to appreciate the work that each crop has had to go through to come to its modern iteration.

About the author

Michael Pollan is the author of seven books, including Cooked: The Natural History of Transformation, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. A longtime contributor to The New York Times, he is also the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.