An excellent re-read. The first time I blew through it and remembered literally not a single thing. Michael Pollan is a little ignorant of his own privilege for my taste, much in the same way Barbara Kingsolver (one of my favorite writers of all time, otherwise) was in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," but his intentions are noble and his prose beautiful. This book is about how silly humans have gone through history thinking we're the ones domesticating plants and bending them to our iron wills, when ACTUALLY plants were around millions of years before us, and they'll survive when we're gone. They've got the key to existence in their cellulos-ic little cages, and we're just the big sloppy bipeds doing their evolutionary bidding. Pollan manages to make an elegant, easy-to-understand argument for the entire theory of evolution using only four plants, each exemplifying one trait each offers that humans have sought for millenia. The apple, for sweetness; tulip, for beauty; marijuana, intoxication; and potato, control. I'm not quite done, planning on finishing reading tonight, but the tulip chapter was my favorite. Mostly for the descriptions of tulip croci pushing through dirt with their long shafts and testicular bulbs. And because the Queen of the Night tulip is one of the most intriguing, strange, and lovely flowers I have ever seen.