Stars: 2
Review by: Mandy Apgar
The style of
this is very, I dunno, "casual" for lack of a better word. The gist is
that it is meant to be a semi sweeping examination of how plants have
interacted with human history and culture. Good
idea. And pretty easy to get overly bogged down in, so the author does
well to break things up in little vignettes so it isn't one technical
subject after another. But (I will readily admit) I am very anal
retentive about things. If I find mistakes in a section
I start to wonder what's wrong with the bits I don't know that much
about - and when the author is supposed to have this great history yet
he can't even spell the alternate names of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
correctly (don't ask, let's just say it is something
I've nerded over since I was 4) and then after pages and pages of more
errors basically says "oh, it was a cotton ball. The end" I basically
morph from Banner to the Hulk in a half second. The first section, "The
cults of trees," on oaks, yews, and others,
wasn't bad. But when he wrote about the crazes in plant collecting he
did an essay on...ferns? FERNS? Alright, so tulips would've been the
obvious choice but they also would have been the more culturally
significant one as well.
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