The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World. (New and Noteworthy).

The Botany of Desire: a Plant's Eye View of the World, by Michael Pollan (New York: Random House, 2001). "About ten thousand years ago," writes Michael Pollan in the introduction of The Botany of Desire, "a group of... plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them. Now came edible grasses (such as wheat and corn) that incited humans to cut down vast forests to make more room for them; flowers whose beauty would transfix whole cultures; plants so compelling and useful and tasty they would inspire human beings to seed, transport, extol, and even write books about them."

Pollan's smart narrative wanders through the history of four plants that have taken advantage of our desires for sustenance, sweetness, intoxication, and beauty--the potato, apple, marijuana, and tulip. The book's accounts of our responses to the allure of these four plants draws readers to a liberating but disconcerting epiphany: there are serious flaws in our general belief that humans have control over the natural world.

Pollan takes us down the Missouri in search of the legacy of U.S. folk hero Johnny Appleseed, to old Amsterdam where the price of a single black Tulip fetched more than its weight in gold, and into the claustrophobic confines of a marijuana grower's indoor factory farm to show the enormous sway each of these plants has held over humans. We are "the objects of other species' designs and desires," writes Pollan. "Seeing these plants instead as willing partners in an intimate and reciprocal relationship with us means looking at ourselves a little differently."