The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the WorldRandom House Publishing Group, 12.06.2001 - 304 Seiten 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. |
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... probably also regard himself as a subject in the garden and the bloom he's plundering for its drop of nectar as an object. But we know that this is just a failure of his imagination. The truth of the matter is that the flower has ...
... probably also regard himself as a subject in the garden and the bloom he's plundering for its drop of nectar as an object. But we know that this is just a failure of his imagination. The truth of the matter is that the flower has ...
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... Indeed, even the wild now depends on civilization for its survival. Nature's success stories from now on are probably going to look a lot more like the apple's than the panda's or white leopard's. If those last two species have a future, ...
... Indeed, even the wild now depends on civilization for its survival. Nature's success stories from now on are probably going to look a lot more like the apple's than the panda's or white leopard's. If those last two species have a future, ...
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... of Wheeling, West Virginia, say— you would probably have noticed a strange makeshift craft drifting lazily down the river. At the time, this particular stretch of the Ohio, wide and brown and bounded on Desire: Sweetness / Plant: The Apple.
... of Wheeling, West Virginia, say— you would probably have noticed a strange makeshift craft drifting lazily down the river. At the time, this particular stretch of the Ohio, wide and brown and bounded on Desire: Sweetness / Plant: The Apple.
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... probably on purpose. The fact, simply, is this: apples don't “come true” from seeds—that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent. Anyone who wants edible apples plants grafted ...
... probably on purpose. The fact, simply, is this: apples don't “come true” from seeds—that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent. Anyone who wants edible apples plants grafted ...
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... probably responsible for the bowdlerizing of Chapman's story. Johnny Appleseed was revered on the frontier for a great many admirable qualities: he was a philanthropist, a healer, an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to ...
... probably responsible for the bowdlerizing of Chapman's story. Johnny Appleseed was revered on the frontier for a great many admirable qualities: he was a philanthropist, a healer, an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to ...
Inhalt
Beauty Plant The Tulip | |
Intoxication Plant Marijuana | |
Control Plant The Potato | |
Epilogue | |
Acknowledgments | |
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