The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

I waited a long time to read The Botany of Desire.  When it first came out, the local library couldn’t keep it on the shelves; I ended up on long waiting lists that I never reached the end of before having to go back to college in the fall.  So I was excited to be able to get it and read it.  It’s not quite what I thought it would be, but that’s mostly in a good way.  Michael Pollan has written a book that is thought-provoking, unexpected, and wide in scope.

The book starts with a short introduction, in which Pollan states that he is interested in how certain plants meet certain human desires:  the apple satisfies sweetness; the tulip, beauty; marijuana, intoxication; and the potato meets our need for power.  He also sets forthhis hypothesis that cultivated plants have used humans to their advantage in order to survive in conditions they wouldn’t normally be able to.

This was probably my biggest disappointment with the book — it seems a fairly obvious idea that plants we care for have used us for their purposes, just as we use them.  It’s an idea I remember encountering in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (although on a smaller scale, and with bits that are much more integral to our physical makeup and survival), and, indeed, Pollan admits that The Selfish Gene played a role in the development of his book.

I loved reading the four chapters, though, because they don’t just push this idea.  Pollan starts out with the apple.  He discusses how wild apples are normally so bitter as to be inedible, and that grafting is the only way to ensure that a tree will bear tasty fruit.  He also gives quite a history of John Chapman — Johnny Appleseed — that I quite enjoyed.  Chapman was a character, spreading seeds (and thus unpredictable apple trees-to-be) into Ohio and, later, Indiana.  He was a vegetarian who went barefoot and enjoyed best sleeping in hollowed out trees.  His story is a charming one that I was completely unfamiliar with.  It was a delight to find such a piece of American history included here.

The section on tulips was a little less interesting to me.  The fact that color variation is due to a virus was news to me, but I’ve heard the story of tulipomania quite a few times.  Pollan brings some insight to the craziness — mainly, that the Puritan conditions of the Netherlands led people to indulge their lust in something relatively harmless, rather than the more earthly pleasures their religion prohibited.  Overall, though, I found it a little long and prone to navel-gazing.

Marijuana, the next chapter, discussed not just intoxication by that particular drug, but also talked about the historical use of many types of substances to induce altered states of consciousness.  Pollan talks about the science at the cutting-edge (at least for the time the book was written) of how marijuana affects the brain.  It’s incredibly fascinating to think about — substances in so many plants, that developed for so many purposes, also have a place in human culture and in human biology both in order to give us experiences we otherwise would never experience.

The lowly potato is the subject of the last section.  I found it a bit preachy; Pollan spends most of the time talking about how the Monsanto corporation has developed a potato with genetic modifications that make the plant create its own pesticide.  He visits some potato farmers, grows his own Monsanto potatoes, and eventually can’t eat the produce once they’re fully-grown, despite the fact that he’d already eaten them at one farmer’s home and in processed potato products.  As a man who is an avid gardener — and who put himself up to the task of growing these potatoes — I would think that he should have at least given them a shot.

The Botany of Desire was a mix of biology, culture, and personal experience.  It worked well in some situations, but not in others, but I think the good parts of the book overshadow the flat ones.  Just don’t look for a straightforward cultural history of agriculture, and you’ll have an enjoyable read.

Rating: 3.5/5.

What Was I Thinking? by William B. Helmreich

I’m not quite sure what I was expecting when I started reading What Was I Thinking?  I’m guessing I was thinking I would read a book about mistakes, and then have solutions directly following those mistakes.  That’s not exactly what Helmreich has created; his book is more of a sociological study of misbehavior, with long lists of why people do things they later regret, with only the tail end providing some solutions.  For something that labels itself as a self-help book on the back, I don’t think it quite makes it; as a study on the mistakes we all make, however, it’s an interesting read.

Helmreich structures the book by dedicating each chapter to reasons people make mistakes, e.g., arrogance or insecurity.  Within each of those chapters, he gives us about nine different ways that particular reason can manifest.  For example, in the chapter on arrogance, the reasons for the arrogance he provides us are:

1. Believing you’re untouchable
2. Overconfidence
3. Obliviousness to others
4. Narcissism
5. A need to dominate
6. A crusader mentality
7. Rage
8. Rigidity
9. Society

He then gives examples and explains how these aspects can create an environment that lends itself to doing dumb things.   These chapters and their separate sections are interesting to read; Helmreich has a good writing style, and his examples and stories are interesting.

What I’m not sure about is how this book all hangs together.  One reason in one chapter seems an awful lot like another reason in another chapter a lot of the time, and, really, I don’t think we need to know much more than that there are some basic personality flaws or situations that can cause someone to do something dumb.

I also had issues with the way the book is structured.  I think it would have been much more effective if, at the end of a chapter, Helmreich provided some concrete solutions as to how to avoid or prevent committing that type of mistake.  Instead, his suggestions are segregated in the last chapter, which doesn’t lend itself to easy reference.  If I think my problem is arrogance, which is the second chapter, I have to go to the end of the book in order to look for guidance to help me overcome my personality flaw.

I do, however, think that What Was I Thinking? makes an excellent study of human nature.  We all make mistakes, and we make them for a variety of reasons.  I enjoyed reading this book because it made an attempt to make sense of our dumb actions, which was something I thought, outside of cases of psychological pathology, was impossible.  Helmreich has taken his sociological training and produced a book that is engrossing, just not for the reasons he was hoping for.

On the whole, What Was I Thinking? is a good sociological study, but a so-so self-help book.  I’d recommend it for curiosity, but not for actual advice.

Rating: 3/5.

A Different Flesh by Harry Turtledove

I like hominids.  When I was in college, I took a physical anthropology course to fulfill some of my natural science credit, and really enjoyed it.  I even remember most of what I learned, which is a feat in and of itself.  So I looked forward to reading A Different Flesh, which puts forth the question — what if American Indians never settled the Americas, and instead Homo erectus (here called sims) was present when Columbus sailed?

To tell the truth, I had no idea where Turtledove was going to go with this.  Having only read his Worldwar series, I was guessing that there would be a lot of warfare.  I was fairly wrong.  Turtledove, rather than following one particular person, spends each chapter in a section of time and explores human-sim interactions.  This felt to me to be a fantastic way of exploring the idea, and one that most authors don’t employ; movement along time to uncover the differences and similarities between his imaginary world and ours helps expose the gulf between the two.

In the beginning, there is violence, and the sims give as good as they get.  Soon, however, it’s clear that the sims are not capable of adaptation, and thus start losing ground — quite literally.  Their land is slowly taken from them, and they become more marginalized.  They are also “domesticated” and used for menial labor.  Sims’ existence also provides a backdrop for the earlier formation of the theory of evolution, which sparks earlier scientific achievements of other types.

Against this backdrop, Turtledove shows us a world in which the Americas outlaw slavery for humans at a far earlier date than our own country decided to — against creatures such as the sims, humans of any type are obviously much the same and are worthy of the full rights deemed appropriate for one’s fellow man.

While declaring all people of equal worth, there is also the prominent struggle of putting sims in the proper context.  Are they human, or merely animals?  What rights do they have?  Turtledove brings this topic up again and again, sometimes in disturbing ways.  Sims are used for medical experiments, much as animals are.  The arguments about using them in such a way are similar to those used to justify the use of other animals for medical research.  How strange it feels to use creatures who have the ability to understand language (plus create spontaneous sentences of their own), create tools, live in camps, cook their food, and plan ahead for our own benefit and not necessarily theirs.

I enjoyed this book greatly.  I have often wondered about what life would be like with another hominid still alive and kicking on Earth.  Turtledove did a remarkable job of providing a possible answer.  His prose is clear, and his conclusions follow in logical fashion.  It is a thought-provoking book, raising questions about how we treat one another and our fellow species on this planet.

Rating: 5/5

Island in the Sea of Time by S. M. Stirling

Island in the Sea of Time sounded good to me.  I love alternate history and speculative fiction.  What could be better than a book that blended both in an innovative way, incorporating some science fiction into the mix?  Unfortunately, despite some good aspects, Island in the Sea of Time fell flat for me.

Let’s start off with the good.  I liked the idea of an entire island of people from our own time being suddenly tossed into the far past.  What challenges they would face?  How would they meet the obstacles facing them?  A fantastic plot, in my opinion.

I also delighted in the anthropological aspects Stirling put in.  Linguistics is an interest of mine, so I found some of the exposition language structure and evolution absolutely fascinating.  His conjectures on how various cultures functioned and how they would react to visitors from today’s world were obviously well-researched, at least on the European side.

The cultural part that I disliked, however, was the heavy focus on building or maintaining technological conveniences, creating weapons, military training, and warfare.  I just wanted to skip over the pages that dealt with this stuff, and that’s bad, since it makes up about half the book.  Many (and I mean many) of the characters have military training, which I found too convenient to be believable.  This leads me to my next issue with the book.

The residents of Nantucket are far too accepting of their situation.  There are a couple of freak-outs in the book, as well as allusions to points of crises within individuals.  I, however, find it difficult to believe that there wasn’t a wholesale rejection of the time shift.  There are off-hand comments about suicide, but they felt like they were obligatory mentions so that Stirling could get on with the story.  We follow no character who has such inclinations; this probably would have made Island in the Sea of Time more compelling, more human on an emotional level.

Character abilities and skills also felt too well-distributed to reflect reality.  A Coast Guard ship just happens to get trapped in the time shift, so we have a military force with at least one fighting ship, plenty of trained soldiers, and modern weapons.  There’s the woman who runs the greenhouse, so we have someone who knows how to grow crops and can teach others how to do so.  We have a librarian who is apparently so freaking talented that she can keep everyone apprised of the information they need to perform their jobs.  We have a historian with interests in the time period the island has been thrust into, as well as a working knowledge of linguistics.  We have an astronomer, who has the ability to communicate with the English tribes because she also can speak a Baltic language that is similar to proto-Indo-European. We have a captain who is, apparently, God’s gift to both military strategy and tactics.  And we have a native woman who is gifted in so many ways that it makes suspension of disbelief very difficult.  On top of that, we lose exactly one of the main cast of characters.  He doesn’t happen to be a central character, either; we probably follow him about a half-dozen times, whereas most of the other characters get approximately thirty to forty sections scattered throughout the book.  That smacks of the unreal to me.

Also unfortunate, in my opinion, Stirling focused on the prehistoric British inhabitants, which was baffling to me, seeing as the island tossed back in time was Nantucket.  We are given very little information about the Native Americans of the area; he allows us to read about their first encounter, and then leaves them almost completely.  This struck me as strange; why toss away a fascinating people who could help the Nantucketers with farming, gathering and the like — as well as trading — in favor of the long sea voyage and constant skirmishes in England?

The other aspect of this is, when we are allowed to view one extended encounter with Central American natives, they are portrayed in a horribly brutal light.  While this might be accurate, some of the actions taken by the Olmecs were horribly graphic — graphic enough to cause me to have a nightmare about one particular scene.  It freaked me out to no end, and also felt unfair to the indigenous Americans.  Why do they get to experience such a characterization, while the European peoples encountered are as nuanced as the Nantucket residents?

Based on the comments by Harry Turtledove and Robert J. Sawyer, I thought I was in for a spectacular read.  I’m saddened to find that wasn’t so.  A more Nantucket-based, psychologically sensitive book would have been fascinating.  Since this is one in a series of books, many of the battles could have waited.  As it is, Island in the Sea of Time leaves the reader with a dry book about martial history, martial tactics, and flat characters.

Rating: 1.5/5

Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans by Brian Fagan

Climate change is not just a modern issue for humans.  Thus is the main statement of Brian Fagan’s Cro-Magnon.  Modern humans owe a lot of their cultural development to adjustments we were forced to make to adapt to fluctuating temperatures and precipitation levels, and our ability to adapt quickly is what made us survive and Neanderthals fade away.

Fagan presents Cro-Magnons to the reader with an astonishing amount of thoroughness.  He discusses tool and weapon development, hunting techniques, clothing and shelter creation, art, and possible religious beliefs in detail.  But first he talks about Neanderthals.

Neanderthals, Fagan argues, had an essentially static and conservative culture that did not develop its own adaptations to the environment quickly.  They were cognitively challenged compared to Cro-Magnons, and could not communicate like we do.  I found this interesting, since he does talk about Neanderthals possessing some of the same technological abilities as Cro-Magnons at about the same time Cro-Magnons developed them.  He claims that they were mimicking what Cro-Magnons had already figured out, and that they lacked the ability to actually think out new ways of handling environmental change.  But hasn’t he argued against himself here?  Isn’t the ability to take someone else’s innovation and use it to your advantage rather clever, actually?  And where did they get their technology from before Cro-Magnon appeared on the scene?  I find the dismissal of Neanderthals’ mental abilities and capabilities a little disingenuous — they were competent and smart creatures.

The rest of the book, though, has a very scholarly feel to it.  The information contained within is detailed beyond imagining.  So much so that it took me back to my physical anthropology class in college, in which I had to read a lot of academic articles on things like prehistoric middens and the earliest known hominid.  Fagan says that the more interested reader should take a look at the articles in his bibliography, but I can’t imagine any but the most die-hard anthropology enthusiast will need to look someplace else for comprehensive information on general Cro-Magnon culture and its changes over time.

And changes are what Fagan concentrates on.  He examines the culture at specific points in time, and discusses how the climate shaped the ways Cro-Magnons went about living life.  For example, reindeer were at one time much more common in Europe because of the lower temperatures.  Because they were more abundant, quite a few Cro-Magnon settlements depended on the annual reindeer migrations as their major source of meat, fat and skins for the winter.  I found this fascinating, since I was vaguely aware that, yes, climate dictated some adaptations, but Fagan masterfully shows how the outside world really has shaped human cultural development since our beginnings.

This is quite an impressive book.  I’d recommend it to those who are interested in the development of humans in Europe.  For both the lay reader and those who are coming to the topic in a more formal setting, Fagan has assembled a fine work that will satisfy.

Rating: 4/5.