Publisher, Gildan Media Corporation (May 2007)

A Publisher's Weekly 'Listen Up Award 2007' Recipient

A National Bestseller and New York Times Notable Book

"Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as our implication in the natural world" --The New York Times

"[Pollan] has a wide-ranging intellect, an eager grasp of evolutionary biology and a subversive streak that helps him to root out some wonderfully counterintuitive points. His prose both shimmers and snaps, and he has a knack for finding perfect quotes in the oddest places. ...Best of all, Pollan really loves plants." --The New York Times Book Review

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers' genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires-sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control-with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind's most basic yearnings. And just as we've benefited from these plants, the plants have also benefited at least as much from their association with us. So who is really domesticating whom?

About the Author: Michael Pollan is the bestselling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire. A New York Times bestseller, The Botany of Desire was named a best book of the year by Borders, Amazon and the American Booksellers Association. His other works include Second Nature and A Place of My Own. Pollan is a longtime contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and teaches journalism at Berkeley. He lives in the Bay area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer and their son, Issac.