Ellen Rosenfield

I do not understand why this book has such rave reviews. Granted, when the author talks about her area of expertise, botany, it's fascinating. She's excellent at describing the natural world. But when she veers into other areas, politics, language, economics, her ideas are simplistic, her tone is sanctimonious, and some of her information is either wrong or misleading. For example, her chapter on the grammar of animacy, she insists that the grammar of her native language, which, for instance, uses "he" and "she" to refer to plants, makes her and other indigenous people more sensitive to the natural world. She then concludes the lack of this grammatical feature in English might might be part of the reason for that Americans have exploited the land. First that conclusion is ridiculous. Second, lots of languages have similar animacy grammar (Japanese, Romance languages, etc.) So, she should stick to botany and leave linguistics to someone else!