Honestly glad I branched out, it's not usually a book i would read but I enjoyed it. There were so many fascinating facts about nature and humans role in shaping it. I have a newfound appreciation for plants, and I think it's incredible that we can bring back really old plants (!!!)

Good range of emotion I was intrigued, surprized, their were moments I laughed out loud -a part where they talk about men trees being useless, i was angry, frustrated, inspired, in awe of plants. A lot of the stories reminded me of the problem with academia and the minutia of all these things. How looking at it historically while the rich were parading researching plants and colonizing the earth people real life humans were fighting for their humanness.

There's a part where he talks about 16th century and the trade with explicitly mentioning the trans Atlantic slave trade and that didn't sit right with me other wise it would've been a 5

A short read about the movement and proliferation of plant life. For such a slim volume, there was a lot of explanation on the human history side of the story and little on the science part of the subject. The majority of the scientific content seemed to be relegated to using the formal, Latin terminology for each species discussed.

It also seemed to both glorify and denounce colonization, depending on the chapter, rather than a more neutral take, or within a framework of the negative outcomes of humanity's impact on the planet.

Mancuso makes the same mistake a lot of popular science authors make and assigns human-like motivations and personalities to plant behavior and evolutionary patterns. It was fine in the beginning but began to grate towards the end.

I listened to the audiobook, so perhaps the illustrations in a hard copy would have been valuable.

In a word, underwhelming. It mostly felt like I was listening to an old, retired botonist describe his life. At times there were deep dives into the history, descriptions, and status of various plant species. Other times, it felt like rambling anecdotes of the author. If I told you that there was artwork in the book, I'm sure you would expect the artwork to be anatomical or at least artistic renditions displaying the author's subjects. However, instead, the artwork is very abstract and does little in the way of helping the topic. If there were only one or two of these abstract pictures in the book, they may have been simply unnecessary, but plesent. However there is so many, that I am wondering if maybe I missed a purpose to them that I had not seen before. In spite of all this, I did learn more about the resilient nature of plants, along with some interesting historical anecdotes. However as previously mentioned, the book was thoroughly underwhelming.

yeah, no