#9 in Nature & environment
The botany of desire
- 304
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“The Botany of Desire” tells the story of people and plants from the plants’ side, in elegant, well-researched prose. Pollan pairs four human desires, sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control, with the plants that answer them, among them the apple, the tulip and marijuana. Some readers find the tulip chapter laboured and warm to the book only after it. Those hoping for the mechanics of plant science may find it closer to reportage and reflection.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
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?
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.9 across 125 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 46% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Nature & environment average of 8.1. That is how 8.0 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.7 | 18 | 14% |
| Hardcover | 8.0 | 107 | 86% |
Frequently asked
How long is The botany of desire?
It has 304 pages — shorter than 75% of the ranked books in Nature & environment.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Nature & environment — with scores between 7.9 and 8.1, closest to this book.
