The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: the bee collects the nectar and pollan to make honey, and, in the process, spreads the flowers genes far and wide. This book demonstrates how people and plants have formed a similarly reciprocal arrangement. He links four fundamental desires - sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control - with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind's most basic yearnings. And just as we've benefited from these plants, these plants have also benefited at least as much from their association with us. So who is really domesticating whom?--from Publisher.