PositiveScience Magazine\"Pollan weaves together three separately engaging stories in a pleasantly meandering style, deftly using his personal experiences with each compound as a jumping-off point for small forays into anthropology, history, politics, psychology, molecular biology, and neuroscience. Even the most distracted reader will come away with an understanding of the physical effects of the spotlighted substances as well as their cultural significance ... Pollan has crafted a narrative that he hopes will influence the stories we tell about plants, their active molecules, and the relationship we have with them as individuals and as a society. But this tome is not a self-help book. Instead of prescribing a list of potential policy actions, he ultimately leaves the details of how we might move forward with plant-derived compounds open to interpretation.\