The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan
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The Botany of Desire
A Plant's-Eye View of the World

Author: Michael Pollan

Narrator: Michael Pollan

Unabridged: 8 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/18/2022


Synopsis

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.

About Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is the author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, all New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, he is also the Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Carmen on March 28, 2016

All those plants care about is what every being cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself... Did I choose to plant these potatoes, or did the potato make me do it?... All these plants, which I'd always regarded as the objects of my desire, were also, I realized, subject......more

Goodreads review by Emily on August 28, 2007

Okay, okay, books by Michael Pollan are clearly a fad right now, but I have bought into it whole-heartedly. He is an amazing, amazing writer: he makes me want to plant a garden, to tour his garden (his bedroom? what?), to only eat organic food, and to find out the story and origin of every morsel of......more

Goodreads review by Caroline on June 10, 2015

This is a marvellous book, which discusses the science, sociology, aesthetics and culture, relating to four plants. Apples Tulips Marijuana Potatoes Because of who I am, the things that interested me most were the tulip and potato sections. With the first, he discusses the notorious obsession surrounding......more

Goodreads review by Heidi on June 30, 2019

Packed with food-related history, trivia and stories, Michael Pollan attempts to explain how four types of plants have had such a large effect on humanity. "We automatically think of domestication as something we do to other species, but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain......more

Goodreads review by Cornelia on August 20, 2016

As beguiling as the plants this book enlightened me about......more


Quotes

"I find this book to be inspirational — curiosity and gentleness of spirit forming genius."
— Richard Ford

"Michael Pollan is a sensualist and a wonderful, funny storyteller. He is so engaging that his profound environmental messages are effortlessly communicated. He makes you fall in love with Nature."
— Alice Waters

“This book is as crisp as an October apple, as juicy as an August tomato, as long-awaited as the first flower of spring,. Michael Pollan has conceived a new and powerful understanding of who we are, and how we stand in relation to everything else—and the stories he tells to prove the point make the world seem a richer place.”
— Bill McKibben, author of Long Distance and The End of Nature

“No one else writes about the human environment quite like Michael Pollan: we can be grateful indeed that one of our wittiest writers about nature is also one of our wisest. In The Botany of Desire, Pollan makes a persuasive case that the plants we might be tempted to see as having been most domesticated by humanity are in fact also those that have been most effective in domesticating us. It is a stunning insight, and no one will come away from this book without having their ideas of nature stretched and challenged.”
— William Cronon, editor of Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature


"A fascinating and disturbing account of man's strange relationship with plants and plant science. Michael Pollan inspires one to rethink basic attitudes. Beautifully written, it is as compelling as a detective thriller."
— Penelope Hobhouse, author of On Gardening

"Like Tracy Kidder, Michael Pollan is a writer to immerse in. He's informed and amusing, with a natural sort of voice that spools on inventively beyond expectations into a controlled but productive and intriguing obsessiveness (whether on Johnny Appleseed or marijuana). A fine book."
— Edward Hoagland, author of Compass Points

"Anyone who has ever made personal contact with an apple, spud, tulip, or marijuana bud should read this book and be astonished at the eternal tango of men and plants, choreographed with wit, daring, and humanity by this botanist of desire who knows equally the power of plants and of words."
— Betty Fussell, author of My Kitchen Wars


"Not since Jonathan Weiner's The Beak of the Finch have I been held so spellbound by a book. Using only four plants, The Botany of Desire succeeds in illuminating the radiant force of evolution. Remarkable."
— Daniel J. Hinkley, author of The Explorer's Garden

"It is a rare pleasure to read a book of ideas so graceful and witty that it makes you smile—at times even laugh out loud—with delight as it challenges you to rethink important issues."
— Mark Kurlansky, author of The Basque History of the World