From Publishers Weekly
Erudite, engaging and highly original, journalist Pollan's fascinating account of four everyday plants and their coevolution with human society challenges traditional views about humans and nature. Using the histories of apples, tulips, potatoes and cannabis to illustrate the complex, reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world, he shows how these species have successfully exploited human desires to flourish. "It makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees," Pollan writes as he seamlessly weaves little-known facts, historical events and even a few amusing personal anecdotes to tell each species' story. For instance, he describes how the apple's sweetness and the appeal of hard cider enticed settlers to plant orchards throughout the American colonies, vastly expanding the plant's range. He evokes the tulip craze of 17th-century Amsterdam, where the flower's beauty led to a frenzy of speculative trading, and explores the intoxicating appeal of marijuana by talking to scientists, perusing literature and even visiting a modern marijuana garden in Amsterdam. Finally, he considers how the potato plant demonstrates man's age-old desire to control nature, leading to modern agribusiness's experiments with biotechnology. Pollan's clear, elegant style enlivens even his most scientific material, and his wide-ranging references and charming manner do much to support his basic contention that man and nature are and will always be "in this boat together."

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title

 From Library Journal
A new generation of American and European sculptors is receiving critical and commercial attention for rediscovering, in the spirit of Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913), the wealth of forms in everyday life. Variously labeled "New Object," "Metaphoric Object," "Neo-Geo," or "Simulationist," this new sculpture mimics familiar objects from industrial, domestic, and historical sources. Eight such artists are features in OBJECTives: Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Annette Lemieux, and Haim Steinbach from New York; Grenville Davis and Judith Opie from London; Katarina Fritsch from Cologne; and Juan Munoz from Madrid. This exhibition catalog, which presents works exhibited at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California from April to June 1990, includes exhibition histories and a selected bibliography for each artist. Goldsworthy is an extraordinarily innovative British artist who employs a range of natural materials--leaves, bark, twigs, petals, berries, rock, clay, stones, feathers, snow, ice--to create outdoor sculpture that works instinctively in nature. His range of scale is impressive, from grasses and leaves to ice spires and slate stacks. Goldsworthy records his works in the 120 full-color photographs that are the subject of this book. The delicate tensions and balance of his collaborations encourage a sharpened perception of the natural world. Goldsworthy's introduction eloquently explains his working methods and philosophy and convinces the reader that he's doing more than playing the primitive.
- Russell T. Clement, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, Ut.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* "I don't know what will happen but look forward to whatever changes occur," writes sculptor Goldsworthy, a statement that can stand as his credo. An artist who works with nature in nature, he creates astonishingly subtle, ephemeral, seemingly impossible, and elegantly mysterious works out of stone, sticks, leaves, stalks, ice, and sand, constructions vulnerable to sun, wind, storms, tides, and time. Documentation is an integral aspect of his art, and, consequently, Goldsworthy, the subject of the gorgeously meditative, award-winning documentary Rivers and Tides (2004), has created a number of beautiful books. His newest covers many recent works--including Garden of Stones, a Holocaust memorial in New York City and the subject of an essay by Simon Schama--and tracks his ongoing involvement with an ancient tradition, the building of cairns. His are not mere stacks of stones marking a trail but rather elaborately constructed and gracefully balanced egg-shaped forms that bring into focus the beauty of their surroundings. Magical and exquisite, Goldsworthy's sculptures move us to look more carefully at the world around us and consider more deeply our place within the fine mesh of life. Donna Seaman
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