Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
I am an unabashed fan of Michael Pollan. Yes, it may sound strange, but in my esteem, he is tantamount to a rock star or a Hollywood A-lister. "But Rachel!" you may be thinking, "he's just a regular guy! In fact, he's just a bald and bespectacled ol' college professor!"Despite these potentially legitimate arguments, I classify Michael Pollan among the ranks of the elite. So, when I learned that Michael Pollan published a book about gardening in the early 1990's, I seized the opportunity to get a...
I've been a gardener my whole life and so was delighted with Michael Pollan's story of his experiences with gardening and the endless struggles we go through as nature does its best to undo our every effort. A great read and a true gem of a meditation on gardens and the human spirit.After 2012:This is my third read of Second Nature. Once again I'm impressed by Pollan's ability to weave personal history with past and present theories/ideas/politics of gardens and our changing attitudes towards th...
All Pollan's books explore the ways people relate to the world around them, from plants to food in general to space itself. This one's about gardens and gardening, and is probably the book in which he most explicitly addresses man's relationship to nature.The oft-repeated thesis of this book is that all American concepts of the physical world and our place in it stress a division between nature and culture, and that while this notion has been useful in its various forms (Puritan establishment to...
This book was, erm, okay. Just okay. There were definitely parts that I really liked about it (historical overview of gardening in the US, Pollan talking about his struggles with his five acres, reminiscing about his childhood gardening memories). But, and this is a big but, each chapter felt like it's own book, with a wrap up that left me feeling like SURELY this should be the end of the book, only to realize there were a gazzillion cds left in the case to go through. When I put in the last one...
This book starts with a discussion of American lawns, and made me think of them in ways I never had before. When I was a kid my family moved to one of the sprawling new suburban subdivisions with thousands of homes in your choice of one of four styles and three paint colors, each on its quarter acre plot. Whatever trees or other natural features had once been there were all gone, the area for miles around bulldozed flat as a billiard table. And throughout that subdivision all the front yards wer...
"It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment."-- Michael Pollan, Second Nature I'm pretty sure I'm now a Michael Pollan completist. This was Pollan's first, and as I typically read the first last, my usual brush with Pollan completism for now. This book sent me back to days working in my grandmother's garden, my mother's garden, my wife and my first garden on our apartment balcony. It...
Written twenty-five years ago, much of what this book is about is as true today as it was then – because much of it is a history of the garden and gardening. It’s also, though, a contemporary study and self-analysis of the author’s one-year experience of putting in a garden(s) on his newly purchased (in 1984) five-acre, old farm, in Cornwall, Connecticut, with bits of social and cultural commentary sown in. Gardens are, he rightly point out, “a form of self-expression …” (p. 242) and Pollan exhi...
If this book has one main contention, it is that gardening should be the ruling metaphor for what our relationship with nature (and consequently culture) should look like. The garden teaches us to wrestle with the tensions between the extremes of “domination and acquiescence”. Having done “something”, we cannot afford to do nothing to our natural landscapes. The garden should be “a place that admits of both nature and human habitation. But it is not, as I had imagined, a harmonious compromise be...
Classic Michael Pollan writing on nature and gardens. Thoroughly enjoyable if you love these topics
Really great book about gardening. Not a how-to, more of an inspirational why-do. Loved it. Excellent writing.
A fascinating and informative read that goes way beyond gardening. Drawing from history, ecology, religion, literature, and philosophy, Pollan discusses how gardening addresses our relationship with nature.Excellent writing style. For example, he entertainingly describes "the loathsome slugs: naked bullets of flesh--evicted snails--that hide from the light of day, emerging at sunset to cruise the garden along their own avenues of slime."In addition to the lowly slug, Pollan addresses big topics
4 stars. Borrowed from Amazon's Prime Library, this book (published in 1991) is not only the author's memoir as a budding gardener but also offers a historical overview on changing Western views of such notions as wilderness, what is "natural," environmentalism, garden design, the politics of seed catalogs, and much more.
Here Pollan describes a garden as “a middle ground between nature and culture,” and explores the philosophical divide between the two. The author writes of his grandfather’s half-acre garden on Long Island and of the summer when his father defied the neighbors by not tending to the lawn. He also chronicles the first seven years of developing his own garden in Cornwall, Connecticut: deciding on the right ratio between lawn, vegetables and flowers; figuring out how compost works; fighting groundho...
