The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession, by Adam Leith Gollner
A nonfiction book about fruit. If you're thinking, "That's an awfully broad topic," yep.
Gollner is obsessed with fruit (which instantly endeared him to me), and decides to do some traveling and research, try some cool fruit, and write a book about it. The result is fitfully delightful but extremely scattershot, with a tendency to go in-depth on topics I do not care about (fruit anatomy, fruit marketing), skimp on what he is by far best at (describing the deliciousness and coolness of specific fruits), and reference a whole bunch of things that I would have liked a citation for, but alas, there are no citations.
For instance, he mentions a "proverb popular in Brazil": "A woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, and a melon for ecstasy." It's certainly possible that the proverb is popular in Brazil, but if you're going to haul out an extremely famous apocryphal proverb about fruit in a book about fruit, you should probably mention that it is typically attributed as an ancient Arabian/Persian/Turkish proverb, is very likely fictional, and may be a joke about foreign perverts rather than a source for the use of fruit as sex toys. That is, I'm sure people have indeed fucked melons because people will fuck fucking anything, but I don't think that old chestnut is evidence of it.
This may seem picky, but the book has an erudite gloss, and if I can find dubious statements without even looking anything up, it makes me wonder about the rest of it.
I feel like I've made this critique of about 500 nonfiction books, but the author was really good at ONE THING, which in this case was describing fruit he'd actually eaten, and if he'd stuck to making the book about that, it would have been way better. (Possibly the all-time worst offenders: Julie and Julia, which intersperses a small number of absolutely delightful accounts of the author cooking Julia Child dishes with endless tedium about her otherwise-tedious life, and Cleaving, which intersperses a tiny bit of fascinating details about learning to be a butcher with an appallingly cringey mass of TMI detail about cheating on her husband, both by Julie Powell.) Perhaps that was not enough for a full book (but I think it would have been; maybe a shorter one) but if you only have enough material for a great long article, I'd rather read the article.
Here, enjoy my favorite part.
The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession[image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
Gollner is obsessed with fruit (which instantly endeared him to me), and decides to do some traveling and research, try some cool fruit, and write a book about it. The result is fitfully delightful but extremely scattershot, with a tendency to go in-depth on topics I do not care about (fruit anatomy, fruit marketing), skimp on what he is by far best at (describing the deliciousness and coolness of specific fruits), and reference a whole bunch of things that I would have liked a citation for, but alas, there are no citations.
For instance, he mentions a "proverb popular in Brazil": "A woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, and a melon for ecstasy." It's certainly possible that the proverb is popular in Brazil, but if you're going to haul out an extremely famous apocryphal proverb about fruit in a book about fruit, you should probably mention that it is typically attributed as an ancient Arabian/Persian/Turkish proverb, is very likely fictional, and may be a joke about foreign perverts rather than a source for the use of fruit as sex toys. That is, I'm sure people have indeed fucked melons because people will fuck fucking anything, but I don't think that old chestnut is evidence of it.
This may seem picky, but the book has an erudite gloss, and if I can find dubious statements without even looking anything up, it makes me wonder about the rest of it.
I feel like I've made this critique of about 500 nonfiction books, but the author was really good at ONE THING, which in this case was describing fruit he'd actually eaten, and if he'd stuck to making the book about that, it would have been way better. (Possibly the all-time worst offenders: Julie and Julia, which intersperses a small number of absolutely delightful accounts of the author cooking Julia Child dishes with endless tedium about her otherwise-tedious life, and Cleaving, which intersperses a tiny bit of fascinating details about learning to be a butcher with an appallingly cringey mass of TMI detail about cheating on her husband, both by Julie Powell.) Perhaps that was not enough for a full book (but I think it would have been; maybe a shorter one) but if you only have enough material for a great long article, I'd rather read the article.
Here, enjoy my favorite part.
The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession[image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
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