Reviews
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MICHAEL POLLAN has perfected a tone — one of gleeful irony and barely suppressed outrage — and a way of inserting himself into a narrative so that a subject comes alive through what he’s feeling and thinking. He is a master at drawing back to reveal the greater issues. At one point in his new…
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UC Berkeley’s Michael Pollan examines what we eat, and how to decide what to eat. That we are living beings who must, to continue living, physically consume other living organisms, is one of the most fundamental facts about our lives. If, as a matter of habit, comfort and self-protection, we allow ourselves to remain less…
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A journalist traces the meal on his plate back through the food chain. Most of us are at a great distance from our food. I don’t mean that we live “twelve miles from a lemon,” as English wit Sydney Smith said about a home in Yorkshire. I mean that our food bears little resemblance to…
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intelligently gory.
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We’re clueless. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma he tries to cut through this fog of unknowing.
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Pollan isn’t preachy: he’s too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He’s also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow’s-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the…
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“Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as our implication in the natural world.” The New York Times
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“[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…
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“We can give no higher praise to the work of this superb science writer/reporter than to say that his new book is as exciting as any you’ll read.” Entertainment Weekly
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“A wry, informed pastoral.” The New Yorker
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“Until I read Michael Pollan’s original, provocative and charming The Botany of Desire, I had never managed to get inside the soul of a plant. Mr. Pollan, an accomplished gardener and garden writer, presents a plant’s-eye view of the world that challenged some of my most basic assumptions about gardening, particularly the one about whether…
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“A whimsical, literary romp through man’s perpetually frustrating and always unpredictable relationship with nature.” Los Angeles Times