Interesting idea, weak execution

books:

	• The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World Michael Pollan Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 163 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fun Book easy quick read

This was a fun book to read. I enjoyed his playful writing style and his personal experiences. I reccomend this book to anyone with a few hours to spend on a warm sunny day. Kick back with a beer and this book and chill.

Coevolution with Plants

This book was thought provoking as it encourages you to reevaluate man's place in nature, from one of dominance to a picture of coevolution despite our insistence that we have "domesticated" plants for our uses. This is a great companion piece to Guns, Germs, and Steel.

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Interesting idea, weak execution

The central idea that guides The Botany of Desire is that plants have evolved to please people as part of their survival strategy. In order to explore this thesis, Pollan looks at some anecdotes from the histories of Apples, Tulips, Marijuana, and Potatoes. It is a clever idea, and Pollan has enough knowledge and style to make it an interesting read.

Unfornately, it never goes beyond an interesting read. If you think about the experience of reading a fairly long and well-written magazine article then you are probably going to get the idea about what this book is like for the reader. Pollan lacks the expertise as a writer to draw together the different threads of the chapters to lead to any real point about his central thesis. While several of the sections are nice to read in their own right (I particularly liked the chapter about apples) they do not really hang together well and often have the feel of a superficial collection of anecdotes. The writing style may also irritate some; he has clearly been heavily influenced by the Wendell Berry/NPR school of writing and while not in itself a bad thing, he lacks the substance to pull it off well and occasionally ends up sounding mannered in a fake folksy kind of way.

The sad thing about the failures of the book is that Pollan clearly knows his material. In the section on the potato, he makes a clear and balanced assessment of the issues that lay behind genetically engineered crop production. He goes far beyond the normal superficial treatment of the subject and speaks with an authority which is lacking for most of the rest of the book. It would have been nice if that confidence had extended to the rest of the work.

In summary, Botany of Desire is a mildly interesting time waster which should tell you some things that you did not know about plants. Do not read it expecting something larger than that. Pollan himself may well be a talented writer, and I would not be averse to reading something else that he had written.

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reviews: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, page 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

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