The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

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.

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: the bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers' genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires--sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control--with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind's most basic yearnings. And just as we've benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?

Praise for the narrator: Scott Brick uses his skill with expression.to produce an audible intoxication. --AudioFile

Margery Fish was one of Britain's leading gardeners. Named a classic gardening writer by the Royal Horticultural Society, she published six other gardening books and was a regular contributor to the British periodicals Amateur Gardening and The Field. Many thousands of visitors come each year to East Lambrook Manor, her Somerset garden.

Michael Pollan is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Botany of Desire and Second Nature, named one of the best gardening books of the twentieth century by the American Horticultural Society. He is a contributing editor to Harper's magazine and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Pollan chose the books for the Modern Library Gardening series because, as he writes, these writers are some of the great talkers in the rich, provocative, and frequently uproarious conversation that, metaphorically at least, has been taking place over the back fence of our gardens at least since the time of Pliny.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780375501296
ISBN 10	0375501290
Title	The Botany of Desire
Author	Michael Pollan
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2001-01-01
Number of pages	304
Prizes	Winner of Connecticut Book Awards (Nonfiction) 2002, Short-listed for Book Sense Book of the Year Award (Adult Nonfiction) 2002
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.