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Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding
By Noel Kingsbury

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44920 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 512 pages

Review
"The reason you and billions of other people will eat today is a century-long effort to increase the yield of crop plants. Hybrid tells the story of the quiet heroes behind this triumph. Noel Kingsbury has written a fantastic history of a subject that should become much better known."�Gregg Easterbrook, author, Sonic Boom (Gregg Easterbrook, author of Sonic Boom )

�I will never look at a slice of bread or grain of rice the same way, having read Hybrid. By recounting the history of plant breeding, the author has revealed the many choices made in creating the crops of today and yesterday, and challenges us to think about our choices for tomorrow.��Cathy Maloney, author of Chicago Gardens (Cathy Maloney, author of Chicago Gardens )

�In plant breeding, just as in evolution, genetic variety is the raw material of success. Hybrid is the story of how the genes that make a fat corn cob, a luscious apple, a brilliantly orange carrot or a high yielding strain of rice have traveled by serpentine paths to reach the genomes of the crops that we so depend on and yet so take for granted. In Hybrid we learn that there was a green revolution in eleventh-century China when a visionary emperor imported new strains of rice from Indochina; how working men in nineteenth-century Britain made a sport of competitive gooseberry breeding, and how a German doctor discovered hybrid vigor in plants. Hybrid the book displays, like hybrids themselves, all the marvelous fruit of miscellany.��Jonathan Silvertown, author of An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds (Jonathan Silvertown )

�A magnificent achievement�Kingsbury tells this gripping story, with a large cast of characters across the entire span of human civilization, with wit, passion, and erudition.��Tim Richardson, author of The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden (Tim Richardson, author of The Arcadian Friends )

�Thoughtful, well researched and refreshingly broad in scope, Noel Kingsbury�s Hybrid took me out of my immediate area of expertise (plants and garden history) and opened my eyes to the way previously unsung plant breeders have transformed societies. Accessible to specialists and non-specialists, it should be essential reading for anyone wishing to take an informed view on the future direction of biotechnology.��Jennifer Potter, author of Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants (Jennifer Potter, author of Strange Blooms )

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