I first heard of Michael Pollan when a friend said that her book club was reading his "Second Nature." I hadn't heard of the author or the book. I looked it up and we read the book driving on a road trip. It was good, interesting and eye-opening. The author said that gardeners are somewhat like lower-level gods, deciding what can live in their gardens and what must die. He also mentioned the development of roses as something that many people worked on.
His "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is long and quite interesting. But for me, his finest is "How to Change Your Mind". Our daughter was mentally ill for about 20 years before she died and we have paid attention to the emerging discussion and impressive results being obtained with psychedelics used in the right setting to help people with mental illness think and act better.
More recently, we listened to Pollan's "Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World". I liked it but I don't think I got much out of it. I thought he would have more about the change from farming hours under one's own control to reporting to a factory when the time to be there came around. I looked up a bit about the book and it said that the modern world bit comes from using a non-alcoholic drink in coffee houses to stimulate thought and conversation.
