MacMillan: The American Grain Family Book

The late historian of science, Philip Pauly (1950-2008), has here provided a series of loosely connected essays about America's horticultural past with emphasis on the identification of usable native plants, the importation of new species, the "naturalization" of the latter within the American setting, and the extermination or suppression of those that proved undesirable.

Pauly has many prescient insights, for instance, that the European claim of the New World's biological "degeneracy" had a better basis in fact than Thomas Jefferson could admit and that the deliberate naming of a wheat pest "Hessian Fly" had unforeseen international consequences. I had never considered that kudzu, the "vine that ate the South," might arguably have been controlled by livestock in fields and chain-gang labor on roadways'until both of these began to disappear. It's also fun to know that the ecologist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold, a heavy smoker, died of a heart attack while firing the property he celebrated in Sand County Almanac (1949).

Fruits and Plains is largely comprehensible to a general reader, though it contains more professorial verbiage than it should. So, for instance, we get "pasture (non-cereal) grasses…behaving more as opportunistic symbionts than as cultivated domesticates," (100) and a criticism that post-modernism "has inflated heuristic into theory at the expense of attention to empirical work on the diversity of experience." (264)

One final piece of advice to the prospective reader: Pauly is an unusually meticulous "forewarner," by which I mean he presents in outline everything he is going to say before he says it, sometimes twice'"first, I will treat this, then that, then the other." Perhaps the tendency arises naturally from being a historian of science.