The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Perspective on the World

Barbara Kelley: This book really makes you think about your perspective as a human. It is really worth the read!

United States on Jun 30, 2023

Lee-Ann Sicard: Interesting topic. Loved the concepts.

Canada on Mar 24, 2022

Puneet Godiyal: Good quality pages but it took more than a month in reaching me even with prime.. So order early if you want.

India on Aug 12, 2021

Sean Veaudry: Good read overall with some interesting thoughts and history behind some of most important seeds and or plants. With some good stories too.

Canada on Nov 28, 2020

Ken Kardash: Don’t get me wrong, I love Michael Pollan’s work. Especially his writing style, which takes full flight here: the way he interweaves stories, facts and speculation, all the while using only the most masterfully crafted sentences. And like his later masterpieces, you cannot come away from it without some new ideas about the plants we consume. What bothers me is that the central conceit underlying this work here. He uses the apple, tulip, marijuana and potato plants to illustrate his theory that they have coevolved with our desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and order, respectively. Trouble is, this theory seems to be pulled out of thin air, perhaps in the haze from the marijuana he has gardened. He generously offers to remove our blinders of anthropocentrism to reveal how these wily plants have evolved to cultivate us as their caretakers. By ignoring the fact that their traits were all deliberately selected from nature by our preexisting desires, his concept of coevolution seems not just ironic, but ridiculous. While waxing philosophic on the beauty of tulips, he even goes to far as to suggest he has discovered the meaning of life. If that’s not breathless enough for...

United States on Nov 11, 2018

John P. Jones III: Thanks to a bit of trans-generational intellectual “pollination,” via the son of a friend from Atlanta who once owned a restaurant and had a passion for food, I was introduced to Michael Pollan’s work “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” a decade ago, which I have read and reviewed on Amazon. Most regrettably, I had not read a second of his works until now. The man has a lot to say; and says it all too well. It is a case of “all the news NOT repeating itself,” to invert one of John Prine’s laments.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” published in 2007, is subtitled: “A Natural History of Four Meals.” The number “four” is also operative in “The Botany of Desire,” which was published in 2002. It is the story of four plants: apples, tulips, cannabis and potatoes. Reflecting the theme of the title, there are four human desires that are associated with these plants: sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control, respectively.

Early in the book Pollan teasingly throws out the idea that perhaps the classic view: “People cultivate plants” should be inverted. For sure, Pollan does not fall off some “New Age talk-to-the-plants” cliff (and they will talk...

United States on Sep 03, 2018

Amazon Customer: I picked up this book from the library at my university. I kept having the extend the loan of the book because i never wanted to give it back. However, I took it back and bought one of my own i was enjoying it that much. Pollan is clearly a beautiful writer, with encapsulating expressions and way of describing things. I built a great awareness of Pollan as a person, as a gardener, as well as his and other speculations of certain plants. It is one of the best books ive read in a very, very long time. I actually read the whole thing, which is a first for me with books!
Definitely recommend this to anyone.

United Kingdom on Feb 13, 2017

Virginia: From the tomato, suspected of poisonous intentions to the tulip, creator of financial frenzy, on to marijuana and the political machinations that surround it, to the potato and the frightening effects of genetic manipulation, The Botany of Desire informs, illuminates, entertains and cautions us about plants and our relations with them. Only the section on marijuana deviated from the title, giving us more of the author's point of view than the plant's. The final section on the potato, Monsanto and the practices of factory farming should be required reading for consumers, producers and those who are taxed with making decisions about pesticides, fertilizers and land use.

Virginia Winters, author of The Facepainter Murders, available on Amazon.com.

Canada on Jun 02, 2012

RetroKryptonite: First of all, if you have never read any of Michael Pollan's books, you are missing out. I would suggest reading The Omnivore's Dilemma first, but this book is very good also. It is a look at how instead of us conquering and "domesticating" four kinds of plants, they have in fact figured out how to use us to propagate their species. The section on apples is my favorite because it seems like this plant completely reinvented itself just so we would enjoy it and spread it around.

I have only two problems with this book. First, the section on marijuana is a little scattered as Pollan begins to describe what the plant does to our mind, then descends into a rambling discussion on the importance of forgetting and the meaning of wonder. Not necessarily bad writing, but not really focused on plants, either.

My second problem is that while the first three sections do for the most part focus on the plants, the potato section is mostly an indictment of Monsanto, the seed company. While this is a company with plenty of demons to expose, the section could have been very interesting if it focused on the potato's evolution and transformations from noxious root to staple food. You...

United States on Feb 21, 2010