“Extremely disappointing. First of, his writing style was overly florid and annoying for my tastes, so I was inclined to less-than-love the book simply because of that, but I am a sucker for a well researched history book, so I could have easily overlooked my stylistic preferences in favour of an illuminating read. Alas, I didn't get that either.
The book is not a coherent linear narrative at all. Instead, the book is divided into chapters that focus on one "aspect" of citrus and it's relation to the world, as defined by the author. Each chapter takes a topic, such as citrus' introduction to the new world, citrus in poetry, etc, and the author pontificates on that topic. Again, not in a particularly cohesive way, either. He like to randomly insert food and drink recipes in the middle of other narratives. I would be interested in a chapter devoted to recipes, not inserting a recipe in narrative about Brazil, even if it is a "Brazilian" recipe. Besides all that, the author also has a lot of opinions he wants to share with us, that have nothing to do with the history of citrus, or even citrus directly. He's pro government (and includes a narrative that shows how "good" government is because if the government hadn't stepped in to destroy some citrus trees, canker would have killed them all anyway, so we sure are lucky! He makes sure to tell us how lucky we are, and how grateful we should be to government several times.). Which is all well and good but has nothing to do with citrus. He also likes to tell us how awesome GMO's are and how lucky we are going to be when we really figure out how to use them. While I do have specific ideas about both those things (against), I'm not opposed to an author conveying an opinion that is different than mine-if he does so in a coherent, well thought out manner, as opposed to randomly interjecting these thoughts into chapters where they are only tangentially related and clearly just an excuse to pontificate about the authors beliefs, rather than an attempt to communicate any facts. And lastly, the author talks to much about himself, his travels, his personal life, and his food preferences for my tastes. I wanted to know about citrus, not why the author hates rutabagas.
There was only one chapter I found truly enjoyable and interesting, and that is the one about bottling and producing juice. The chapter on citrus in poetry was...ugh. Painful. I skipped it, and the following chapter, entirely.”
