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A review by ganzleiselaut
The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species by Carlos Magdalena
2.0
Okay, first of all: I‘m a huge plant nerd and botany has always been one of my favorite things while studying biology. This book was promising because the author, Carlos Magdalena, is so excited by plants that he devoted his life to saving them. So far, so good. But I had so many issues with this book.
Even though it manages to write species names in italics – which many books don’t do and which drives me mad every time I see it – there are so many flaws. First, the botanical drawings here and there. It’s nice, yes, but those don’t have to do with the plants earlier talked about in a chapter. For example, there is an orchid at the end of a chapter about the café marron? Why? That doesn’t make sense. Then, these drawings aren’t even labelled. Why would you do that? It just doesn’t. make. sense. I can just imagine an editor that just didn’t have a clue about botany and thought: “Well, it’s a plant so let’s include it!”
Oh, and don’t get me started on the editing. This book seemed so unorganized. Quite a lot of it is about the endemic plant world of Mauritius. Which is great and interesting because it has so many endemic plants and a lot of them are on the verge of extinction. But the chapters didn’t make sense to me – as did the titles of them. It just didn’t work because in each chapter the author changed plants and I felt like it would have been better to organize it by plant, you know? Kind of like this:
Location A
Plant A – some other title to add information
It’s found here
It’s on the verge of extinction because
I tried this
It ended like this
That’s all that should have been done in order to get the book organized.
Then there’s the issue I had with the plants and the photos included in the book. There are photos, yes, and some of them are of the plants Magdalena helped. But there is no mention in the text, and you have to flip to the photos to search for the right plant and to either find a photo or not. Why haven’t they just added a simple “see photo x in the photo section”? This way you have to look for it yourself and can’t be sure whether it just isn’t there or you’ve been to clumsy to find it. And why not include a map of the places you talk about? There were so many mentions of important places and the geography that I just wanted to see where exactly they were. But okay, that’s just my preference and I can accept the fact that they didn’t think it necessary.
And the terminology. Yes, there is a glossary but some of the terms just aren’t explained and for me, with a background in biology, it was okay, but I can only imagine that other people would struggle and either have to google all the time or just shrug it away and continue without understanding the terms. If the anatomy of a flower is so important – because he frequently talks about what worked and what didn’t when trying to pollinate – why not include a small chapter with a diagram or two just to get people on the same level? Again, I didn’t struggle as much but since this book seems to be aimed at laymen, I didn’t get why that wasn’t there.
Oh, and why wasn’t it mentioned that Magdalena didn’t even write the book? It kind of felt like fraud to find out in the second to last paragraph in the acknowledgments. That’s not o-fucking-kay.
So, yes, I wanted to love this book but there were so many issues with it that I just couldn’t. It’s a shame because it holds so much potential, but it was executed so poorly.
Even though it manages to write species names in italics – which many books don’t do and which drives me mad every time I see it – there are so many flaws. First, the botanical drawings here and there. It’s nice, yes, but those don’t have to do with the plants earlier talked about in a chapter. For example, there is an orchid at the end of a chapter about the café marron? Why? That doesn’t make sense. Then, these drawings aren’t even labelled. Why would you do that? It just doesn’t. make. sense. I can just imagine an editor that just didn’t have a clue about botany and thought: “Well, it’s a plant so let’s include it!”
Oh, and don’t get me started on the editing. This book seemed so unorganized. Quite a lot of it is about the endemic plant world of Mauritius. Which is great and interesting because it has so many endemic plants and a lot of them are on the verge of extinction. But the chapters didn’t make sense to me – as did the titles of them. It just didn’t work because in each chapter the author changed plants and I felt like it would have been better to organize it by plant, you know? Kind of like this:
Location A
Plant A – some other title to add information
It’s found here
It’s on the verge of extinction because
I tried this
It ended like this
That’s all that should have been done in order to get the book organized.
Then there’s the issue I had with the plants and the photos included in the book. There are photos, yes, and some of them are of the plants Magdalena helped. But there is no mention in the text, and you have to flip to the photos to search for the right plant and to either find a photo or not. Why haven’t they just added a simple “see photo x in the photo section”? This way you have to look for it yourself and can’t be sure whether it just isn’t there or you’ve been to clumsy to find it. And why not include a map of the places you talk about? There were so many mentions of important places and the geography that I just wanted to see where exactly they were. But okay, that’s just my preference and I can accept the fact that they didn’t think it necessary.
And the terminology. Yes, there is a glossary but some of the terms just aren’t explained and for me, with a background in biology, it was okay, but I can only imagine that other people would struggle and either have to google all the time or just shrug it away and continue without understanding the terms. If the anatomy of a flower is so important – because he frequently talks about what worked and what didn’t when trying to pollinate – why not include a small chapter with a diagram or two just to get people on the same level? Again, I didn’t struggle as much but since this book seems to be aimed at laymen, I didn’t get why that wasn’t there.
Oh, and why wasn’t it mentioned that Magdalena didn’t even write the book? It kind of felt like fraud to find out in the second to last paragraph in the acknowledgments. That’s not o-fucking-kay.
So, yes, I wanted to love this book but there were so many issues with it that I just couldn’t. It’s a shame because it holds so much potential, but it was executed so poorly.