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Cargando... The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2001 original; edición 2002)por Michael Pollan
Información de la obraThe Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World por Michael Pollan (2001)
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Another Michael Pollan book in which he explains in an interesting way certain connections about certain plants, but he doesn’t talk very much about his own personal experiences with taking these plants. But this is kind of typical. You will learn a lot about many things, but you might not routine them but at the time you’ll feel as if what you were listening to or reading is extremely profound. ( ) I picked up The Botany of Desire at the library following txkimmers's recommendation. This is an incredibly cool set of four essays on plants and people: apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes. Pollan does a great job turning around our usual view of "domesticated" plants. We usually see ourselves manipulating plants to serve our needs, making the plant just another tool. As he points out, plants aren't just hapless bystanders here. They have their own agenda, to reproduce!, and every plant that finds a way to get humans to help it along is using us, too. There's some great stories here. I had no idea Johnny Appleseed was such a character, and so totally different from the image that our grade-school books promote. The exploration of Monsanto's genetically engineered potato -- how they make them, how they're grown, why they're attractive to the US market -- was both creepy and cool. Do I really want to be eating these? And how will I even know? I always both read more in the spring and enjoy reading more, because I have what feels like infinite plane time during my annual conference binge. Some books really benefit, and I think this is one -- Pollan was quite dry in parts of his exploration of the culture relationship between humans and cultivated plants and I'm not sure I would have been able to maintain interest without a plane ride sprawling in front of me. The dryness of the writing, which in my opinion arose from bizarre literary choices, like the need to categorize every human instinct and plant behavior into Dionysian or Apollan (because...actually I never figured it out. I think it was to contrast chaos in the natural world with artificial imposition of order. But I think you can do that while still consigning Dionysus to the books about grapes.) Once I got past that, the book was actually quite good. I usually am terrified of books invoking evolutionary concepts because it's just so poorly done in most popular literature, but Pollan has a very good grasp on genetics; often he first offers an anthropomorphized or simplified hypothesis about why a trait such as sweetness evolved and then goes deeper to explore how that would actually be a competitive advantage for a plant carrying a specific gene. I thought it was extremely interesting that most of the plants in the book were plants that don't "breed true" (i.e. have a sexual reproductive pattern resulting in genetically diverse offspring), such as apples and tulips, and how the extreme diversity that results within a single species of plant turns out to be a strong advantage. Pollen argues that this is particularly true as an artificial advantage because it makes plants adapt more quickly to human demands for cultivation. Interesting, but not completely convincing. Anyway, I found the individual stories of each plant also interesting, in particular the story of the apple, how it was first used almost entirely for alcohol on the American frontier and the Johnny Appleseed story and the story of the tulip and the Dutch tulip mania. I was less convinced by the exploration of marijuana, which had a strong focus on why humans would evolve an endogenous cannabinoid pathway that I found overly speculative. Potatoes, the Irish potato famine and genetically-modified organisms was done in a less speculative manner and I thought Pollan explored the differences between the artificial selection already introduced in the book with GMOs in a very even-handed manner.
In other words, human desire shapes the plants that then shape human desire. In displaying for us, in his graceful and literate way, the intricacies of the mechanisms involved, Mr. Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as on our implication in the natural world. It's an absorbing subject, and Pollan, like his hero, brings a clutch of quirky talents to the task of exploring it. He has a wide-ranging intellect, an eager grasp of evolutionary biology and a subversive streak that helps him root out some wonderfully counterintuitive points. His prose both shimmers and snaps, and he has a knack for finding perfect quotes in the oddest places (George Eliot is somehow made to speak for the sense-attenuating value of a good high). Best of all, Pollan really loves plants. Pertenece a las series editorialesTiene como guía/complementario de referencia aPremiosDistincionesListas Notables
Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers' genes far and wide. In "The botany of desire", Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires: sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulop, 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, the plants have also benefited at least as much from their association with us. So who is really domesticating whom? No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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