Synthetic Happiness

The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan Read by Scott Brick

Description

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulop, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, the plants have also benefited at least as much from their association with us. So who is really domesticating whom?

Click here to read the full AudioFile Magazine review of this title

Banana

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World by Dan Koeppel

Description

From its early beginnings in Southeast Asia, to the machinations of the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica and Central America, the banana's history and its fate as a victim of fungus are explored.

New York Times - Op-Ed Contributor

Yes, We Will Have No Bananas

By DAN KOEPPEL

Published: June 18, 2008

If bananas reach $1 a pound, the strategy that allowed banana companies to turn an exotic, tropical fruit into an everyday favorite will begin to unravel.

The Nation - Banana Kings by Emily Biuso

Your Inner Fish

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin

Description

Why do we look the way we do? What does the human hand have in common with the wing of a fly? Are breasts, sweat glands, and scales connected in some way? To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today's most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources: worms, flies, and even fish.

Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of anatomy who discovered Tiktaalik—the "missing link" that made headlines around the world in April 2006—tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria.

Shubin makes us see ourselves and our world in a completely new light. Your Inner Fish is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible, and told with irresistible enthusiasm.

Second Nature

Second Nature: A Gardener's Education by Michael Pollan

Anne Bradstreet

Thoreau - Autumnal Tints How beautifully they go to their graves," "How gently they lay themselves down and turn to mold... They teach us how to die."

Whitman - "This Compost"

Ortho Rose Dust - "Madeleines are everywhere in the garden (and surely Proust is its guardian spirit)."

Beyond the Outer Shores

Beyond the Outer Shores - The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell by Eric Enno Tamm

Seeing Joseph Campbell's name mentioned, I picked up this book. Since reading the "Masks of God" thirty years ago, I've admired Joseph Campbell. Reading this book has reawakened my interest in him as well as created new interests in John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers as well as that of the subject of this biography Ed Ricketts. I've got copies of Ed Ricketts' "Between Pacific Tides", His and Steinbeck's "Sea of Cortez", Steinbeck's " Log from the Sea of Cortez" and "Cannery Row", and a paperback collection of Jeffers' poems which includes the "Roan Stallion" which features prominently in this book stacked up by my bedside.

I copied out three excepts from the book dealing with Joseph Campbell's relationship with Ed Ricketts which I'll share here.

From page 13:

Campbell was also at a personal impasse, in his "own deep swamps" as he recalled. Out of work for five years, he was depressed and confused.
"I've been saying no to life," Campbell told Ricketts one day.
"Well," Ed replied typically, "the best way to start saying yes to life is to get drunk. I'll take some of my laboratory alcohol, [and] we'll make a drink out of it."

From page 180:

It had been an "epochal voyage," according to Joseph Campbell. The 1932 trip brought about "one of the primary personal transformations of a life dedicated to self-discovery." Many of the philosophic conclusions reached during the voyage would resonate in the future work of both the marine ecologist and mythologist.

From page 214:

In his research at the time Joseph Campbell was coming to the conclusion that the same fate that befell the Haida was now befalling modern society. "We have seen what has happened, for example to primitive communities unsettled by the white man's civilization," Campbell later said, "with their old taboos discredited they immediately go to pieces, disintegrate, and become resorts of vice and disease. Today the same thing is happening to us."

RAT by Jerry Langton

RAT - HOW THE WORLD’S MOST NOTORIOUS RODENT CLAWED ITS WAY TO THE TOP
JERRY LANGTON

From the swamps of Southeast Asia, to the medieval Black Death to its unshakable niche in modern urban centers, the rat has incredible evolutionary advantages

Plague carrier, city vermin and an out-and-out menace to modern man, the rat, like death and taxes, is a certain fixture on humankind’s history. Rats are found in virtually every nook and cranny of the globe and their numbers are ever increasing. Rats are always adapting and they seem to outwit any attempts
by humans to wipe them out. What makes the rat such a worthy adversary and how has it risen to the top of the animal kingdom?

• Rats have been discovered living in meat lockers. The rats in there simply grew longer hair, fatter bodies and nested in the carcasses they fed upon.
• A female rat can, under good conditions, have well over 100,000 babies in her lifetime.
• A rat can fall 50 feet onto pavement and skitter away unharmed.
• A rat’s jaws can exert a force more than twenty times as powerful as a human’s.
• The front side of a rat’s incisors are as hard as some grades of steel.

In Rat, Jerry Langton explores the history, myth, physiology, habits, and psyche of the rat and even speculates on the future of the rat and how they might evolve over the next few hundred years.

JERRY LANGTON is a now freelance writer whose work appears regularly in The Globe & Mail and The Toronto Star. In doing research for the book he spent a lot of time in sewers meeting with rats face to
face. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36384-0
5 1/2" x 8 1/4" / 208 pages
Includes 100 b&w photos and illustrations throughout


Steve Goddard's History Wire:

"Rat -- How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top by Jerry Langton, St. Martin's '07, $21.95, 207 pages, ISBN #0-312-36384-2. No index, bibliography or source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Within the entire constellation of subjects a writer could immerse himself in, rats ranks pretty low with this writer, particularly when learning that to get up close and personal with those he writes about, Jerry Langton had to spend lots of time in sewers. But, hey, there's no accounting for taste, is there?

Among the more interesting tidbits the author has unearthed is that more than a half-million homes in North America keep rats as pets, and some describe them as clean and affectionate, even though he also finds that the front side of a rat's incisor teeth can be as hard as steel. Message: don't piss off your rat. Langton tells us that 'Rats can swim well enough to catch fish, and can hold their breath long enough to climb out of your toilet.' (Alfred Hitchcock, call your office).

Rat enthusiasts, freelancer Langton tells us, have their own websites, associations, and even breed shows. Imagine, a Best in Show Rat. 'A rat can fall 50 feet onto pavement,' he writes, 'and skitter away unharmed.' Don't throw Fido off the balcony to test this theory.

On the serious side, rats are a terrific public health problem in many countries and are nearly universally found where messy human beings concentrate. One reason they proliferate so quickly, the author writes, is that "A female rat can become pregnant hours after giving birth and since the gestation period is about the same time as it takes to wean baby rats, litters can be continuous."

Rat : how the world's most notorious rodent clawed its way to the top / Jerry Langton.