Second Nature

A self-critical and often hysterically funny account of what happens when you plant a garden to be “one with nature” and nature has other ideas. Still my favorite Pollan book (his first!), which is saying a lot. Favorite bit: his journey from “living in harmony” with a resident groundhog to an albeit ill-considered act of firebombing.

In this, Michael Pollan’s first book, he plants the seeds (sorry) for his later, more journalistic and socially-oriented books in his own garden. His prose can leap off the page, as with his vivid description of slugs as “naked bullets of flesh--evicted snails--that hide from the light of day, emerging at sunset to cruise the garden along their own avenues of slime.” Oh, and he also has issues with groundhogs.