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?

AUTHOR BIO

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of Second Nature and A Place of My Own, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1997. His writing has received numerous awards, including the QPB New Visions prize (for Second Nature), the James Beard Award, and the first Reuters—World Conservation Union Global Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism. Pollan teaches writing in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to the painter, Judith Belzer; they have a son, Issac.

NARRATOR BIO

Actor and writer Scott Brick has performed on film, television and radio. He’s read over 250 audiobooks and AudioFile magazine calls Scott “a rising and shining star” and honored him as one of the magazine’s Golden Voices. AudioFile has praised his understated approach and noted: “In all his work, Brick almost sings in a youthful, manly voice brimming with personality and gusto.” He seems to have an intuitive ear for the authorial voice, an uncanny ability to portray the personality of the author as well as those of his characters.”

REVIEWS

"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

"A whimsical, literary romp through man's perpetually frustrating and always unpredictable relationship with nature." -Los Angeles Times