Shortlisted for the Natural World Book Prize
Michael Pollan is the author of two prize-winning books, SECOND NATURE and A PLACE OF MY OWN. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Pollan was recently awarded the first Reuters-World Conservation Union Global Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and son.
"Pollan's stories sparkle with curious facts and bold superstitions ... His aim is to encourage us to reconsider our place in the natural world" Sunday Telegraph "Beautifully written, as compelling as a detective thriller" Penelope Hobhouse 'An immensely readable and thought-provoking book' The Independent 'Pollen's stories sparkle with curious facts and bold superstitions ... His aim is to encourage us to reconsider our place in the natural world' Anne Chisholm Sunday Telegraph
"Pollan's stories sparkle with curious facts and bold superstitions ... His aim is to encourage us to reconsider our place in the natural world" Sunday Telegraph "Beautifully written, as compelling as a detective thriller" Penelope Hobhouse 'An immensely readable and thought-provoking book' The Independent 'Pollen's stories sparkle with curious facts and bold superstitions ... His aim is to encourage us to reconsider our place in the natural world' Anne Chisholm Sunday Telegraph
Plants are important to us for many reasons. Pollan, an editor and contributor to Harper's and the New York Times Magazine and author of Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, muses on our complex relationships with them, using the examples of the apple, the tulip, the marijuana plant, and the potato. He weaves disparate threads from personal, scientific, literary, historical, and philosophical sources into an intriguing and somehow coherent narrative. Thus, he portrays Johnny Appleseed as an important force in adapting apple trees to a foreign climate but also a Dionysian figure purveying alcohol to settlers; tulips as ideals of beauty that brought about disaster to a Turkish sultan and Dutch investors; marijuana as a much desired drug related to a natural brain chemical that helps us forget as well as a bonanza for scientific cultivators; and the potato, a crop once vilified as un-Christian, as the cause of the Irish famine and finally an example of the dangers of modern chemical-intense, genetically modified agriculture. These essays will appeal to those with a wide range of interests. Recommended for all types of libraries. [For more on the tulip, see Anna Pavord's The Tulip (LJ 3/1/99) and Mike Dash's Tuplipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused (LJ 3/1/00). Ed.] Marit S. Taylor, Auraria Lib., Denver Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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