[sufue]

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan is on sale at Kindle and Kobo US for $1.99. I read this back in DTB days and really really enjoyed it. Pollan takes four plants (apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes) and examines the plants and their relationship to us and how they meet various "desires" of humans (for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control, respectively). And he thinks about whether we are affecting the plants or the plants are affecting us. I'm making it sound a lot less cool than it actually is though, so please don't be put off by my description - this really is a an enjoyable book - while reading it, I felt more like I was reading a fiction/page-turner than a non-fiction book.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Botany-Desire...dp/B000FC1H14/
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-botany-of-desire

Spoiler:

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.

Pollan also has another title that has recently dropped to $1.99 at Kindle US, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. I haven't read this one, but am looking forward to doing so now.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Food-...dp/B000VMFDR2/

Spoiler:

#1 New York Times Bestseller from the author of How to Change Your Mind, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Food Rules

Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because in the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion--most of what we’re consuming today is longer the product of nature but of food science. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American Paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we see to become. With In Defense of Food, Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Pollan’s bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.