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The Botany of Desire

A Plant's-Eye View of the World

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The Botany of Desire

By: Michael Pollan
Narrated by: Michael Pollan
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About this listen

 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. Agricultural & Food Sciences Biological Sciences Botany & Plants Ecology Gardening & Horticulture Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Science House Plants
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Thoroughly enjoyed this book from start to finish, it was recommended by a fellow gardening enthusiast and I was absolutely enthralled to the closing chapter. There were so many evolutionary ideas that resonated with my own ideas about plants and their unmistakable part alongside and within our journey as humans on this planet, and how we are so intertwined as species. I think that so many people would benefit from reading this book and enjoy it. I also think that it should be made into a series of TV documentaries, THAT would be fabulous! An absolutely fabulous listen and I thoroughly recommend if you are into gardening, plants, the natural world, evolution, environmental science, humanity, natural history or anything like that.

Very in depth and beautifully written, well woven narrative backed with gentle science in story form

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