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Learn to COOK - The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession
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List Price: $25.00
Our Price: $16.50
Your Save: $ 8.50 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Scribner
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.34
EAN: 9780743296946
ISBN: 074329694X
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2008-05-20
Publisher: Scribner
Studio: Scribner
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Editorial Reviews:
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Delicious, lethal, hallucinogenic and medicinal, fruits have led nations to war, fueled dictatorships and lured people into new worlds. An expedition through the fascinating world of fruit, The Fruit Hunters is the engrossing story of some of Earth's most desired foods. In lustrous prose, Adam Leith Gollner draws readers into a Willy Wonka-like world with mangoes that taste like piña coladas, orange cloudberries, peanut butter fruits and the miracle fruit that turns everything sour to sweet, making lemons taste like lemonade. Peopled with a cast of characters as varied and bizarre as the fruit -- smugglers, inventors, explorers and epicures -- this extraordinary book unveils the mysterious universe of fruit, from the jungles of Borneo to the prized orchards of Florida's fruit hunters to American supermarkets. Gollner examines the fruits we eat and explains why we eat them (the scientific, economic and aesthetic reasons); traces the life of mass-produced fruits (how they are created, grown and marketed) and explores the underworld of fruits that are inaccessible, ignored and even forbidden in the Western world. An intrepid journalist and keen observer of nature -- both human and botanical -- Adam Leith Gollner has written a vivid tale of horticultural obsession.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Where have all the copy editors gone?
Comment: This book is a slapped together group of articles with no effort to unify them. There is much that is good and informative in the book but on general information the author is not to be trusted. For example a Persian saying "Women for breeding, boys for pleasure, but melons for sheer delight." is ascribed to Brazil. Also the author's reference Moon bases and Mars voyages in the present tense makes me wonder if he and I are in the same space/time continuum.
Customer Rating:
Summary: entertaining, but....
Comment: After reading this book, I thought comparisons to Michael Pollan were inevitable and was surprised to see no previous reviewers had made them. But perhaps comparing this first book to Mr. Pollan's (Botany of Desire, anyone?) is unfair. This book is more about the people who love and seek out exotic fruits than the fruits (and plants that produce them): More Outside Magazine than Omnivore's Dilemma. Gollner provides description after (somtimes hilarious) description of exotic fruits, the people who seek them and his experiences eating them, but little about the plants and cultures or ecosystems that produce them (life cycle, growing conditions, history of human cultivation, etc.) But hey... the title is "The Fruit Hunters", not "The Fruit Plants". In the strongest sections, the author focuses on recounting a specific trip (e.g., going to the Seychelles to sample Coco de Mer). Weaknesses include an abundance of lists of things like seed banks, early fruit explorers, that are not backed up by more explicit information. These lists seem almost music-video like: flashing glimpses with no substance -- and left me with more questions than satisfaction. The book also sometimes suffers from an over-abundance of "characters", the most egregious and irrelevant of whom appears on page 42, a woman next to Gollner on an airplane. These many introductions can make keeping up with who is whom a little irritating. Overall, its more entertaining than substantive, which may be just what you need.
Customer Rating:
Summary: fruit mother flower fruit death and LIFE
Comment: this book is a roller coaster of the highest highs and lowest lows.
> the mouthwatering magnificent to the toxic and terrible. specialized
> heirloom orchards to the metallic and oil-drenched fruit
> industrialization. it brings my juiciest desires and but also my
> paranoid pathologics. i have begun the tasting of life- and this
> fruitfully bound catalyst is an uncontrollable force. it so funny, and entertaing, terrifying and entrancing.
i have to say that I AM a fruit obsessee like the folks written about, and there still are endless exciting adventures and knowledge in here! not only a magnificent story to get lost in, but a wonderful resource if you want to start tasting the best fruits of your area, and the world!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Delicious
Comment: This is such a great book. Gollner never takes his subject matter quite too seriously - a must if you're writing about a topic so obscure. His descriptions of the fruits he encounters are truly creative - he manages to weave the English language in such a way as to convey the impossible -the taste of exotic fruits to readers who've never heard of, much less sampled them. Without the haughty arrogance of the common food writer who scorns the tastes of the masses, Gollner makes the reader yearn for the fine, rare heirloom fruits that we know exist, yet have given up on finding. And he does this by bringing us into the world of those weird, devoted individuals who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of fruit.
This is an interesting, fulfilling book. Highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Do publishers have fact checkers any more?
Comment: I must admit that reading the first couple chapters puts you in the mood for your own fruit eating orgy! But then comes a two page synopsis of the history of the Universe per the New York Times fiction pages. Two stand out. That calculus was 'invented' by Arabs. i.e, Arabic numbers. They actually got all that math when they destroyed a very advanced civilization in India in the 12th century. That is not invention unless pillaging and destruction were brand new. The second was Jefferson and Washington being gentlemen farmers: Growing food for pleasure only. Does this mean that in 1790 they got into their Hummers and loaded up at Costco? There were several more of these and I stopped reading. I read to learn new things, and if an author can't be trusted with general facts what is he doing with the fruit arcana? All in all it felt like a teenage romp on someone else's dime.
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