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Chargement... The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination (2015)par Richard Mabey
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Great book. Really a survey, or, perhaps, as advertised , a cabaret. Definitely a jumping off place to find out even more about both the plants and the books and artists mentioned along the way ( ) Very entertaining mixture of scientific informaion and personal reminiscences. Manages not to spend too much time on some of the subjects of many pop-sci botany books (i.e., carnivorous plants). And what time Mabey does spend on those topics is presented through a cultural lens that makes the subject fresh. [Audiobook note: Ralph Lister is an excellent reader.] This book covers a very interesting, though not much explored, subject of the history of how humanity came to perceive plants and their roles. This, in some sense, is a history of botany, but taken in a much broader sense of how societies understand plants. As the subtitle suggests, the book focus on the human perspective of plants, with many tales of discoveries and fascinations, fads, and the personalities behind such events. If you read it expecting to have plants as the main characters, this will be disappointed. But that you probably know. If this is a book about the forty thousand years of plant life and the human imagination, it comes with little surprise that this will focus on the human dealings with plants. If you like plants; and if you like to discover how humans have changed their perceptions about these fascinating yet so strange living things, this book will definitely entertain you as well as enlighten you on this subject. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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The Cabaret of Plants is a masterful, globe-trotting exploration of the relationship between humans and the kingdom of plants by the renowned naturalist Richard Mabey.A rich, sweeping, and wonderfully readable work of botanical history, The Cabaret of Plants explores dozens of plant species that for millennia have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty, and belief. Going back to the beginnings of human history, Mabey shows how flowers, trees, and plants have been central to human experience not just as sources of food and medicine but as objects of worship, actors in creation myths, and symbols of war and peace, life and death.Writing in a celebrated style that the Economist calls "delightful and casually learned," Mabey takes readers from the Himalayas to Madagascar to the Amazon to our own backyards. He ranges through the work of writers, artists, and scientists such as da Vinci, Keats, Darwin, and van Gogh and across nearly 40,000 years of human history: Ice Age images of plant life in ancient cave art and the earliest representations of the Garden of Eden; Newton's apple and gravity, Priestley's sprig of mint and photosynthesis, and Wordsworth's daffodils; the history of cultivated plants such as maize, ginseng, and cotton; and the ways the sturdy oak became the symbol of British nationhood and the giant sequoia came to epitomize the spirit of America.Complemented by dozens of full-color illustrations, The Cabaret of Plants is the magnum opus of a great naturalist and an extraordinary exploration of the deeply interwined history of humans and the natural world. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)580Natural sciences and mathematics Plants BotanyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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