Book Review

We want to write The Harry Potter Letter and send it to Michael Pollan.

You know the letter, the ones JK Rowling gets by the sackful every day. It goes like this:

Dear Michael Pollan,

We love your books the best and please please please write loads more really fast because we have read them all and can't wait until the next one.

Yours truly, John and Sally.

Fine, you say, but who on earth is Michael Pollan, and why does he deserve the HP Letter?

Well, some years back, in The New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan wrote a lengthy article about genetically modified potatoes. It was called, 'Playing God in the Garden'. 'It's an heroic effort', wrote the friend who mailed it to us. Heroic? It is the single greatest piece of journalism we have ever read. Pollan is a whizz.

So, we tracked him down a bit. Along with journalism, Pollan has written two books; 'Second Nature' is about his education as a gardener. 'A Place of my Own' is about his education as a builder. Both are superlatively funny and informed books, and we recommend them highly.

And the good news, if you missed 'Playing God in the Garden', is that it is one of four essays (altered and revised for the book), which make up Pollan's new book, 'The Botany of Desire'. Here, his passion for gardening, nature, growing and research collide beautifully, as he studies the history of the apple, the tulip, and marijuana, along with what Messrs Monsanto would like to do with the spud. It's a brilliant, illuminating, human and deeply moral book, from a writer who can find some sort of God in the seed of every plant and who writes with a prose as carefully measured as a Shakespearian sonnet. Awesome. Send that Harry Potter letter right now!

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, (Random House, £15.44)