Best seller - Up in Smoke?

The Phactor took one look at this book title, and all that came to mind was Up in Smoke, the 1978 stoner film with Cheech and Chong.  After all when you publish a book titled: Uses and Abuses of Plant-Derived Smoke, what else would you think?  Well, actually lots of things, for example, incense.  Remember frankincense and myrrh were considered very valuable commodities in Biblical times.  And of course, delivering prayers or other messages by smoke, par fume, gave us the word perfume.  A colleague smoked rather cheap cigars because they kept insects, and everyone else, away, but many insect repellents are delivered via smoke.  Or the time the Phactor threw a huge arm load of green "ditch weed" (fiber race) on a campfire to dispose of it, and pretty soon an aromatic smoke covered a whole campground with the smell of burning hemp. Take that mosquitoes!  On one hand, this sounds like a fun, informative, if not rather esoteric book, but the last thing the Phactor needs is more ethnobotanical lecture material. The most esoteric thing in my files: an entire treatise on tooth sticks of the world.  HT to AoBBlog.

Tough Review, but it's a masterpiece!

“It must be said at once that this book is better than having a sausage stuck to the end of your nose.” (Mark Golden’s review of a book by S. Pomeroy in Classical Review). How's that for not a very favorable review? Oh, but this one might top it, especially in science. "It is quite possibly the most overwrought, absurdly contrived, pretentious expansion of feeble post hoc rationalizations I’ve ever read. As an exercise in agonizing data fitting, it’s a masterpiece." (P. Z. Myers, infamous blogger). Go here to see what publication this applies to. Good thing he doesn't review botany.

Book Review - Ambonese Herbal

Reading a review of the Ambonese Herbal made the Phactor realize that he is not the only person to have struggled to finish a book. 81 years from start to publication is not something to emulate, and maybe my publisher would get a bit testy about the delays. Still this is a remarkable effort. Ambon is part of modern day Indonesia, and the natural history contained in these volumes is the earliest reports from that area predating Alfred Russel Wallace's reports by over 100 years. This would be great to have, but the whole set costs $450. Sounds like a library acquisition is in order. Regarding my own efforts, the manuscript was easy enough to finish, although you feel obligated to update things as new research is published, and the longer you take the more of them accumulate, but the figures are taking forever.

Book Report - 100 Top Food Plants

Even before the Phactor has finished reading about all 50 plants that changed history, another book cataloguing the 100 most important food plants lands on my to-read table. My first thought is what a sad commentary on how overly busy things have been that in the past 4 months that so little progress has been made on the to-read books pile. And now a new semester is starting, so there you go. No time to read books let alone write books. But it is necessary to acknowledge that these people who get their books actually finished must be admired for that if nothing else. Oh, yes, the book, their book, a published book. OK, that's sort of whiny; the Phactor did get a pdf of his most recently published research paper just day before yesterday (ooo, color plates!), and with two more in press, it's not that the keyboard has been idle.

To start, how do you choose the 100 most important food plants? Well, by following the lead of Prescott-Allen and Prescott-Allen (1990, Conservation Biology) who documented that 103 plants provide over 90% of the food for 96% of the world's people, and that's just what the author, Ernest Small has done, with some quite well thought out adjustments to the list it came to exactly 100. The book is organized as a series of brief essays each of which includes some intriguing sections like the culinary terminology associated with each plant, which is totally delightful for the garbage minds among us (amaretto, amaretti, tortoni, frangipani, and so on for almond). Each essay has a bibliography (yea!) and specialty cookbooks (fun!) listed. The introduction to food is quite good, paralleling the introduction to food in my economic botany class, which is quite good too. Included is a nice section on the geographic origin of food plants. The book is a paperback with only black and white illustrations, but it's also a great book deal price-wise, and with a conference discount to boot, it was a must buy! There is quite a bit of overlap between the two books in terms of the plants listed, but the content does not overlap as much as one might presume, being primarily in the area of taxonomy and names, which in my case are fairly well known already, and thus skipped over. So both are recommended for those so interested.