Anatomy of a Rose: Exploring the secret life of flowers by Sharman Apt
Russell, Perseus, $24, ISBN 0738202088
BOOKSELLERS everywhere must be wondering where to shelve this slim volume.
Its title has more than a whiff of the botanical treatise, and the text is
dotted with familiar schoolbook diagrams of cut-away flowers and the like. Yet
writers of textbooks rarely remark: “I am sitting naked in a hot spring…My
friend next to me is also naked.”
So how to pigeon-hole Anatomy of a Rose? It’s part of a new genre pioneered
in the US—a hybrid of popular science and nature…
