MEDIA: NYT Book Review โ
June 4, 2018 – Michael Pollan has long been concerned with the moral dilemmas of everyday life. โSecond Nature,โ his first book, was ostensibly about gardening, but really about ways to overcome our alienation from the natural world. โA Place of My Own,โ his second, chronicled the โradically unhandyโ Pollanโs construction of his writing studio. โThe Botany of Desire,โ his third and possibly greatest book, put him back in the garden, though in a more global state of mind. He then went on to write four searching books that wrestled, in one way or another, with the ethics of eating, one of which contained Pollanโs now widely shared haiku: โEat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.โ Unlike many best-selling nonfiction writers, Pollan doesnโt write self-help books that cross-dress as narrative nonfiction. Heโs entirely too skeptical for that. At the same time, though, heโs an often relentlessly sunny, affirmative writer. โIn Defense of Food,โ Pollanโs most polemical book, despairs of American eating habits, yet concludes with the dainty recommendation to eat local as often as possible. Pollanโs literary persona has a rare, almost Thoreauvian affect: the lovable scold.
