Rating: 
Summary: Conversational prose, brimming with allusions
Review: I just finished this lovely little book,and would highly reccommend it. If nothing else, this book prepares one for many interesting conversations. I am now knowledgable about the true Johnny Appleseed, the tulip craze of Holland, the highly specialized marijuana culture, and new developments in the genetic engineering of potatoes. (To name a few!)
The fact that Pollan is not a scientist, but an avid gardener and researcher, among other things, should be considered an asset to the reader. He avoids esoteric scientific terminology, but the text remains sophisticated because his allusions prove huge amounts of research. Each part of the book, each "desire", has its own special charm. I would be hard pressed to choose a favorite. This book truly opens one's eyes to "a plant's-eye view of the world". Though by no means the be-all-end-all on this topic, it is a beautiful natural history.
Rating: 
Summary: where's the editor?
Review: A good editor could have trimmed this to about half its size and the result would have produced an only marginally passable text. The idea that angiosperms have co-opted humans is a very thin hook to hang a book on. Plants achieved this with fauna millions of years before man came on the scene. The earths reductive oxygen rich atmosphere is the result of the huge sucess of angiosperms; plants don't need human intervention, they've done quite well without us. Pollan confuses the reader further by suggesting that plants are sort of able to think up ways to make themselves more atractive to humans. He refutes his own theisis over and over however, when he lets slip that apple horticulture is made up of grafting a tiny selection of varieties; that covert pot growers never allow the plants to actually seed out; that modern potato agruculture leaves as little to nature as possible. These practices do little or nothing to help the plant in question pass genetic material into future generations, rather, plants selected by humans over time, may be so co-opted by us to have become sort of genetic dead ends. The book becomes a polemic for anti bt technology in the potato chapter ,whiich quickly makes that section mind bendingly dull. Other reviewers have suggested that the chapters would stand alone in the New Yorker but I don't think that weekly would allow such a flawed idea to get past the editors but if it did , they'd have a lot of cutting to do.
Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: this is my favorite book - fiction or nonfiction - so far this year. this spring after i've planted my garden and all the new plants begin to bloom, i'm going to sit in my garden chair and read this again.some reviewers said that they didn't feel michael pollan proved how plants themselves where changed by man (or visa versa). they much have had the tv on as they read the book. do yourself a favor and read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Get your book discussion group together!
Review: After finishing the first chapter about apples, I did indeed
check the Bible to see if apples are mentioned in Genesis. Pollan gives us reason to pause and consider our assumptions about nature and its symbolic significance to us human beings. I am most impressed by how many different fields of study Pollan visits in his explication of the four plants that are the subjects of the chapters. To me, it seems inaccurate to classify the book in the "gardening" or "natural history" subject area since it brings in lots of different perspectives. In some ways, it is a social history with new insights into a character like Johnny Appleseed and his true motivation for planting those trees. His section on tulips brings together aesthetics and economics--two diametrically opposed disciplines. It is just as much a poetical essay--it underscores the mythic tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian views of nature. It wrestles with the environmentalist who wants us to keep hands off nature as much as the microbiologist who wants to engineer it. Gardeners will enjoy it, but I think ministers and scientists and law enforcement officials will all have something to say about the ideas Pollan mixes into his four essays. Even those of us who are quite naive about the drug world gain much by his research into marijuana culture. And those who never think twice about the potatoes in our fries might start to think about them! I was impressed years ago by Pollan's "Second Nature" and I think that is what attracted me to this new book. "Second Nature" worked well in the book discussion class I taught back then. I can see this new book stirring up quite a bit of discussion, too.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but flawed
Review: I found this book interesting but it had some notable flaws. In some places his background research was poor. When he talks about cold blood dinosaurs (they weren't) and that sugar hypes you up (it doesn't) I wondered what else he had wrong. I also found that his writing was colored as what I perceive as his political perspective of the world. What was most disappointing though was that he never answered his central question, how plants had used humans to make themselves more successful. He talks around it some but most of his book is how humans modify plants for their own use. Still, if you keep the faults in mind it is still interesting. The section on the apple appealed to me the most.
Rating: 
Summary: Nuggets of information buried in an avalanche of opinion
Review: Michael Pollan had a great idea, but the finished product just does not live up to its promotion. Much of this book is filler material. He takes four plants and gives different historical perspectives on them, some more successfully than others. Perhaps the least interesting for me was the chapter on Tulips. The most interesting was his final piece on the potato.
Would I buy the book again? No. Would I recommend it?
Only if you are prepared to be bored by about half the material.
Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing.
Review: Pollan's book is unexpectedly dull reading. Although I liked some passages, I found Pollan's writing irritating and repetitive in many places. In an attempt to be profound, he too frequently uses cliches. Experienced gardeners and garden book fans may be disappointed with this book--I was.
Rating:
Summary: should have been a series of articles in the New Yorker
Review: This material would have been perfect as a series of four very interesting articles in the New Yorker. Unfortunately it was combined (under a theme that was a bit of a stretch) and over-expanded to fill the pages of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Took much "meta-physical" (...), not enough entertainment
Review: After hearing about this book on NPR I was quite interested in it due to the stories. In reading it the cool stories are there, but they are buried in a bunch of "Illness as a Metaphor" type discussion. If that is your thing, you will like the book. If you want cool stories about plants and their histories only, it isn't since the ratio of story-fact to new-age speculation isn't high enough.
Rating:
Summary: Poor.
Review: I expected good things from this book, and I gave it the benefit of the doubt. But Pollan's argument isn't new, and it isn't persuasive. Most of it seems like a contrived effort to come up with a book. I think I could forgive even that if it were more entertainingly written. Would I buy this book again? No.
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