Reviews of Second Nature

April 30, 1991

“Second Nature is…as delicious a meditation on one man’s relationship with the earth as any of you are as likely to come upon.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“One of the distinguished gardening books of our time.”
—Noel Perrin, USA Today

“The best book about Americans and their gardens in decades. Second Nature reads like brilliant entertainment, but it is serious wisdom. Michael Pollan…is a genuine heir to my favorite nature writer, Mark Twain.”
—Simon Schama, The Boston Globe

“A joy to read…[Pollan] writes with humor, acerbity, magnanimity…and all those good qualities that lead to charm and—one almost dares say it—wisdom.”
—Henry Mitchell, Los Angeles Times

“Delightful…Part autobiography, part gardening book, part intellectual odyssey…[Second Nature] is a large-spirited and ultimately hopeful work.”
—Frank Levering, The Washington Post Book World

“Deft and often dazzling… about gardening, but only in the same way that Dante’s Divine Comedy is about getting lost in the woods… I know no book on gardening that is quite as illuminating and fascinating as this one.”
—Allen Larcy, The New York Times

“You don’t have to be a gardener to love Second Nature. Pollan is a marvelous essayist: indeed he is to gardens what Lewis Thomas is to medicine—expert, witty, and original.”
—Frances FitzGerald

“Second Nature is to gardening what Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler is to fishing. Combining humor, natural description, and advice, it’s not so much about compost, seeds, seasons, and pests as it is about human nature.”
—Thomas D’Evelyn, The Christian Science Monitor

“Wonderful… Pollan brings the shrewd eye of a social historian… Most things in Pollan’s book work upward toward metaphor—even though he takes care to root every metaphor in aerated soil, rich with the compost of organic experience.”
—Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe

“He’s written a book about gardening that even non-gardeners might want to read… Pollan can still remember that there are readers of intelligence and curiosity whose gardening habits amount to no more than a stroll through the yard every month or so to see what’s died.”
—Malcolm Jones Jr., Newsweek

“As a non-gardener, I never expected to stay up late and laugh out loud at a book like this, but I’ve been permanently Pollan-ated.”
—Christopher Buckley, Vanity Fair

“Pollan is a hybrid—a gardener-philosopher-humorist-polemicist who has written a book that manages to amuse while it muses, a book that lures even the non-gardener into the physical and metaphysical garden.”
—Jocelyn McClurg, The Hartford Courant