This book is pretty good. An engaging series of tales, about 4 plants and the entwining of their fate with human history. We have involved ourselves in their evolution, and they have obliged our desires by evolving new properties to suit us.
The four plants are the apple, the tulip, the marijuana and the potato. There's lots of fascinating stuff to be learned, particularly about the genetics of these plants. And plenty of interesting anecdotes about people and their desires for what these plants should be.
The only flaw with the book is the Chaucerian structure. There is a thread that connects the four stories together, but it's a very thin one. Each story is good, but the parts are greater than the whole. It's a good book, and I recommend it, but it's not the best of the books that I've read recently. To put it another way, I enjoyed it very much, but I COULD put it down.
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