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paulbrad25's review against another edition
5.0
It's somewhat bewildering that a man who is allergic to apples could produce such a wonderful, in-depth dedication to them.
Perhaps his objectivity helps his fascination, as instead of getting distracted filling the book with taste descriptors he instead waxes lyrical at length about the history, economics, botany, mythology and romance of apple trees and their wonderful fruit.
I'll certainly be looking out for more by the same author.
I received this book from a friend as a birthday present in 2018 and got interrupted by moving house, and then again by the arrival of my new waterproof kindle.
I've gladly relocated my gifted and dedicated copy to my permanent shelf and bought a digital copy for my kindle as I've been often inspired to nip to the shop for a bag of fresh apples.
Delightfully chilled Braeburns are currently de rigueur.
Perhaps his objectivity helps his fascination, as instead of getting distracted filling the book with taste descriptors he instead waxes lyrical at length about the history, economics, botany, mythology and romance of apple trees and their wonderful fruit.
I'll certainly be looking out for more by the same author.
I received this book from a friend as a birthday present in 2018 and got interrupted by moving house, and then again by the arrival of my new waterproof kindle.
I've gladly relocated my gifted and dedicated copy to my permanent shelf and bought a digital copy for my kindle as I've been often inspired to nip to the shop for a bag of fresh apples.
Delightfully chilled Braeburns are currently de rigueur.
shanaqui's review against another edition
informative
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
4.0
Broadly speaking, I really enjoyed this book. I came across it during my sudden random interest in histories about food, and though it's also a history about cider and farming fruit, it ticks some of those boxes. It's perhaps a little unusual in that the author can't actually eat apples due to an allergy, so though he happily tastes cider (which doesn't trigger the allergy), he's otherwise stuck with other people describing the flavours (and textures, which always seem to be mentioned when people describe eating an apple).
There are... a few things that drove me absolutely nuts, though, so people would be forgiven for thinking that I didn't actually like the book at all. The first thing is the firm location of King Arthur stories in England, as an English thing (just like apples are English, even when he's talking about ones from South Wales). He's done some half-assed research, like this:
There are... a few things that drove me absolutely nuts, though, so people would be forgiven for thinking that I didn't actually like the book at all. The first thing is the firm location of King Arthur stories in England, as an English thing (just like apples are English, even when he's talking about ones from South Wales). He's done some half-assed research, like this:
The problem for Celts who want to claim the Arthurian myth as their own is that the details -- such as we assume them now -- don't stack up. [...] But Sarmartian warriors did ride horses, which were first domesticated on the Kazakh steppe, and they did wear chainmail and armour of overlapping scales. If we look at the customs and legends from the homeland of these armour-clad horse warriors, other familiar aspects leap out. [...] There's even a sacred golden cup in the Central Asian myths that sounds an awful lot like the Holy Grail.
Sounds very convincing, right? Except the man has done the very bare minimum of research, and quite possibly skimmed his theory off the blog of a random Arthurian enthusiast. It's manifest bollocks from start to finish: he bases his theory about King Arthur being a Sarmartian on the grounds that we imagine King Arthur to have been armour-clad and riding a horse. But that's just the version of King Arthur that we're most familiar with, one that wasn't really codified until much later. Early sources don't mention anything about horses or chain mail or any of that stuff. If the sacred golden cup of Central Asian myths has any links to Arthurian literature, those links are no earlier in the Arthurian canon than Chrétien de Troyes, who made the first reference to a graal -- which wasn't even a cup.
Meaning, dear friends, that Pete Brown's imagined parallels are largely way too late to have any bearing at all on whether Celts can claim the Arthurian myth as their own. We obviously can: the Welsh have the oldest sources.
It is a little worrying when I come across research as woeful as this in a book that involved allegedly years of research. Kind of throws the rest in a bad light -- as does saying that CRISPR involves turning genes on and off, rather than full scale gene editing. CRISPR, if we can get past the problem of targeting it precisely, can do whatever gene editing we want. Plus, if you're going to reference CRISPR, then maybe don't just explain it like that with a throwaway footnote saying "No, me neither" -- some of your readers do actually understand what CRISPR is, or are more than capable of looking it up.
(In case you want to edit that footnote, Mr Brown, here's my suggested text: "CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. It's a tool adapted from bacterial defences against invasive viruses which can be used for gene editing." Fixed that for you; not much more difficult to understand than "No, me neither", and much better at giving context if someone is interested.)
Also, it's really, truly, incredibly, breathtakingly, moronically irresponsible to write that you are worried about eating "moth bits" in an apple if the tree was gene-edited to include a resistance gene from moths. It's a piece of DNA; it doesn't make bits of a moth, you idiot. It makes a protein which has nothing to do with any part of the moth's lifecycle. If you took that gene and begged it, it could not become a moth, nor could you reconstruct moth DNA from it. If you really want to make some kind of comment about gene editing, I strongly recommend you go and spend at least one more year on your research, because you patently don't understand a thing about it right now.
All of that said, I realise that makes it sound like I hated the book, but the parts where he sticks to what he knows and has experienced are very pleasant -- he waxes poetical about the beauty of apples, the traditions surrounding them, and the events he's taken part in that involve apples. He should have stuck to that, because overall it's a really enjoyable read.
dreesreads's review against another edition
3.0
Pete Brown is well known as a beer writer (at least among homebrewers), but for this book he tackled apples. Brown is actually allergic to fresh apples, which adds an interesting (if odd) touch to this book.
I found this book very interesting, but--and note the subtitle above--this book is about England. Sure the US and NZ both get mentioned tangentially, but this is about England. English orchards, English festivals, English varieties, English cider, English funding, English apple research, and so on and so forth.
I definitely learned a lot--but honestly, most of what I learned about involved English customs that I knew nothing about. There are also well-known varieties in England that I (in California) have never heard of. IMO this book could really use some color plates and maps to better illustrate the places and apples he is talking about--this book was purchased in the US and has the dollar price printed on the cover (update: husband actually purchased from Amazon UK, but the $ price is printed on the flap). I do realize the original English target audience might not need maps and plates, but ti would be nice for the secondary audiences they are marketing to!
And now I want to go apple picking and cider drinking in Somerset.
I found this book very interesting, but--and note the subtitle above--this book is about England. Sure the US and NZ both get mentioned tangentially, but this is about England. English orchards, English festivals, English varieties, English cider, English funding, English apple research, and so on and so forth.
I definitely learned a lot--but honestly, most of what I learned about involved English customs that I knew nothing about. There are also well-known varieties in England that I (in California) have never heard of. IMO this book could really use some color plates and maps to better illustrate the places and apples he is talking about--this book was purchased in the US and has the dollar price printed on the cover (update: husband actually purchased from Amazon UK, but the $ price is printed on the flap). I do realize the original English target audience might not need maps and plates, but ti would be nice for the secondary audiences they are marketing to!
And now I want to go apple picking and cider drinking in Somerset.
lnatal's review against another edition
3.0
From BBc Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
Symbolically and nutritionally, the apple has played a significant role in human life for millennia. From its origins in Kazakhstan, its spread along the old spice roads and into mythology, it is now an all-year round supermarket staple.
In this four-part abridgement of his new book, Pete Brown follows the cycle of an orchard's year to illuminate the hand-in-hand-history of humanity and our most familiar fruit. Along the way, he turns his hand to the three most labour-intensive jobs in the orchard: grafting, picking and pruning.
Pete Brown has written several books on food and drink, including Man Walks into a Pub, Three Sheets to the Wind, and Shakespeare's Local. He is a judge for the Great Taste Awards and the Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards, and is a frequent contributor to the Food Programme.
Written and read by Pete Brown
Abridged by Laurence Wareing
Produced by Kirsteen Cameron.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b081ld2t
Symbolically and nutritionally, the apple has played a significant role in human life for millennia. From its origins in Kazakhstan, its spread along the old spice roads and into mythology, it is now an all-year round supermarket staple.
In this four-part abridgement of his new book, Pete Brown follows the cycle of an orchard's year to illuminate the hand-in-hand-history of humanity and our most familiar fruit. Along the way, he turns his hand to the three most labour-intensive jobs in the orchard: grafting, picking and pruning.
Pete Brown has written several books on food and drink, including Man Walks into a Pub, Three Sheets to the Wind, and Shakespeare's Local. He is a judge for the Great Taste Awards and the Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards, and is a frequent contributor to the Food Programme.
Written and read by Pete Brown
Abridged by Laurence Wareing
Produced by Kirsteen Cameron.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b081ld2t
halfmanhalfbook's review against another edition
4.0
A few years ago I remember someone who lived in an Orchard Close frequently having to explain to people what an orchard actually was. For those of you still unsure, Pete Brown has titled this book to give you a subtle clue. These glorious pieces of landscape have been created by man for hundreds of years and are that bridge between the completely wild and the tamed garden. In these beautiful creations, you will find all sorts of wonderful things, cherries, pears, cobnuts, but most frequently, the apple.
Taking us through all of the stages in the year to bring the apple tree to fruit we will learn about cold units, grafting, why you cannot plant just one apple variety and he even has a go at harvesting. His journey starts with a slice of fresh apple, and very nearly ends there when he realises that he is allergic to them! Thankfully he is not allergic to cider… His journey takes him far and wide starting with the Pagan festival of Beltane, he meets morris men, Kingston Black, scientists, wassailers, makes a pilgrimage to the home of the Bramley, joins in with an Apple Day, helps make cider and meets yet more morris men.
It all started when he was researching about cider and realised that he had made more notes about the places where the apple was grown than he had about the cider. The seeds that were sown there, lead to this superb book on the delight of that most English of places, the orchard being written. He is a great author, up until now I have only come across him on Radio 4, but this book is witty, whilst staying interesting and rigorous all the way through. Sadly, orchards have been on the decline, something that he intends to change by writing this book, with the hope that communities celebrate these places for what they are.
Taking us through all of the stages in the year to bring the apple tree to fruit we will learn about cold units, grafting, why you cannot plant just one apple variety and he even has a go at harvesting. His journey starts with a slice of fresh apple, and very nearly ends there when he realises that he is allergic to them! Thankfully he is not allergic to cider… His journey takes him far and wide starting with the Pagan festival of Beltane, he meets morris men, Kingston Black, scientists, wassailers, makes a pilgrimage to the home of the Bramley, joins in with an Apple Day, helps make cider and meets yet more morris men.
It all started when he was researching about cider and realised that he had made more notes about the places where the apple was grown than he had about the cider. The seeds that were sown there, lead to this superb book on the delight of that most English of places, the orchard being written. He is a great author, up until now I have only come across him on Radio 4, but this book is witty, whilst staying interesting and rigorous all the way through. Sadly, orchards have been on the decline, something that he intends to change by writing this book, with the hope that communities celebrate these places for what they are.
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