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BOOK REVIEWS--NONFICTION
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-eye View of the World
by Michael Pollan
©2001 Random House
New York 271pp
The author and various reviewers have claimed that this book shows how certain plants have exploited humans in order to become successful species. I cannot count the number of ways I object to that viewpoint. So, I read this book with some trepidation. Luckily for me, the author does not stick to his objective very well. The idea of plants exploiting humans comes up a few times as an inconvenient thought experiment, but the book is hardly a convincing dissertation on how four plant species have enslaved us all. (I am also glad it wasn't really a story from a plant's point of view. The only author that has ever done that successfully, in my opinion, is Ursula K. LeGuin.) The book contains an essay on some history of human interaction with each of four plants. Apple demonstrates the human desire for sweetness, tulip the desire for beauty, cannabis the desire for intoxication, and potato the desire for control. The essays on the apple and the potato are gems. The apple chapter gives interesting insights on American pioneer life by tracing the history of the apple in America, with a focus on Johnny Appleseed. The potato chapter deals with more modern themes of agribusiness and genetic engineering. Both chapters explore some interesting aspects of how human endeavor can be shaped by the limitations of botanical systems (genetic variability and methods of reproduction, for example). The potato chapter provides the most accessible, cogent and nonpropagandistic argument against genetic engineering I have ever read. The tulip and cannabis chapters, on the other hand, were meandering collections of trivia. I'm pretty glad I didn't buy this book at full price (it was a gift - thanks Mom!). But, if you can get it cheap or can check it out of the library, I do recommend reading half of this book. -EF
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