The Botany of Desire

The first book up (admittly some three weeks later than I had planned), is The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. The book comes in at around 250 pages depending upon the edition you have purchased - as low as about $2 on Amazon - and contains an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue.

Pollan's approach to enlightening his audience about the intermingling of man and nature is to distill human desire down to four primary components and identify them with a plant - sweetness to the apple, beauty to the tulip, intoxication to marijuana, and control to the potato.  For each of these he then delivers a historical origin, rise to dominance, his own experiences, and the potential or actual pitfalls that exist.  To his credit, he does appear to have travelled quite a bit in the process of researching his topics and incorporated his adventures well with the flow of the book.

The main body of the book starts out with the right plant - the apple.  This was the most intriguing chapter if one's instert is piqued by such things as how apple trees are really grown, the true Johnny Appleseed's agenda when it came to planting apple seeds, and how the apple's tumultuous history has dragged it from being a founding part of civilized life to the enemy of society and back again. 

Personally, I found the second chapter on tulips to have a series of highs and lows when it comes to level of interest, but not so much so that one would want to abandon the book.  Yes, there were some interesting pieces of history to be found, but it seems lacking when compared to the others.  It should also be noted that the reader is often presented with moments of deja vu due to small facts that seem to be repeated more often than is necessary.

Pollan's discussion of marijuana was quite revealing, though that may have more to do with my inexperience than with thoroughness.  The legal history from the chapter alone made it worthwhile to read, but the anecdotes of Pollan's growing experiences and research in Amsterdam made for a fun experience.

The final plant and desire to close the book was the potato with its control.  Although I believe that what Pollan has to say about organic growing and the genetically altered NewLeaf potatoes to be relivant to the health of people, it just did not phase me enough to question my french fries at the next fast food visit.

Overall, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World is well written, packed with history and facts, and rooted in old-fashioned research.  It incorporates modern achievements of human agriculture as well as many of the past's long time successful methods.  I'd recommend this read for anyone who is interested in the science and history of the plants we encounter every day.

Check back soon for the next book, The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America!  Follow the link to find out more and to pick up a copy for yourself.

Hello World!

Welcome to Pensive Ponderings!

As time goes on, I will be adding my thoughts about various topics to this blog and, I hope, you will be adding your comments about those same topics and my thoughts.  As a forewarning, I will say now that most of these will concern the various 'microhistory' books that I will be reading and thus you may not find some of them interesting.  That being said, please do check back at other times because you never know when the topic will change dramatically.

The question that should pop into most people's minds now is "What is a microhistory?".  That is a fair questions since novels and textbooks are the far more common types of books that people encounter.  The origins of the microhistory is actually linked to the first microhistory that I read (The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, by Carlo Ginzberg).  Charles Joyner put it nicely when he said that microhistories "search for answers to large questions in small places." Basically, the author(s) chooses a specific person, item, etc. and makes it the topic of intensive research and shows a link between the topic and its importance to history.  The idea for microhistory started in 1970's Italy with intellectuals such as Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzberg.  The concept spread to inspire research by French and German historians throughout the 1980's and 1990's.  The works are part of many lines of research including cultural history (The Cheese and the Worms), social history (Intangible Heritage: The Career of an Exorcist in the Piedmont of the Seventeenth Century), and historical anthropology (The Return of Martin Guerre). 

More recently, there have been some particularly intriguing mircohistories by authors such as Mark Kurlansky (Salt: A World History, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, etc), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, etc), and Benjamin Wallace (The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine).

One final note in this opening post, I would like to apologize for the URL using 'ponderment', but every variation using 'pondering' has already been taken.  The more depressing bit of news is that all of them are years outdated, some with more than a decade of inactivity and most with only one or two posts total.  Perhaps these people are simply being particularly pensive about the topics that they find worth pondering, but I am more of the mind that these blogs have been abandoned.

Check back in the future, make comments, and enjoy some of the reading yourself!