the botany of desire young readers edition

And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also helped them to thrive. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. He links four fundamental human desires-sweetness, beauty, energy, and control-with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, coffee, and the potato.

In this entertaining young readers edition of the environmental studies classic, Michael Pollan demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a reciprocal relationship.

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.By the bestselling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, this is Michael Pollan's ingenious companion book about the surprising and close relationship between people and plants. 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. Now available in a paperback edition, this book for young readers traces the life and work of Johannes Vermeer, one of historys most distinctive and enigmatic. 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. 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. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. How could flowers, of all things, become such objects of desire that they can drive men to financial ruin? 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. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. In 1637, one Dutchman paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price of a town house in Amsterdam.

The botany of desire young readers edition