Chicago Sun-Times: Hooray for Johnny (hic) Appleseed!

The eccentric 19th century vagabond Johnny Appleseed, whose real name was John Chapman, sheds his idealized Disney identity in Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire (Random House, $13.95). Johnny may not be a happy-go-lucky frontier evangelist for apple sauce, but he wins high marks as an early champion of biodiversity.

Pollan's entertaining and informative study of the effect of human desires on plants, subtitled A Plant's-Eye View of the World, credits Chapman with expanding the apple gene pool to help to make the fruit not only a favorite in the U.S. diet but also the key to a wholesome, doctor-free life and central ingredient of the dish defining the national character, apple pie.

In each of the four essays in this book, Pollan focuses on a particular human desire as patron to the evolutionary fortunes of a particular plant: sweetness and the apple, beauty and the tulip, intoxication and marijuana, control and the potato.

Sweet apples were highly prized in the days before easy access to refined sugar. But seeds from apples do not "come true." Each of the five seeds in every apple carries a different combination of genetic material. Most apples turn out to be what Pollan terms "spitters"-- sour and inedible. To get a dependable crop of the occasional winning apple in this game of botanical roulette, you have to clone the parent tree by grafting. But the genetic wheel requires lots of players to produce winners, and cloning popular apples kept the number of players down. This is where Johnny Appleseed left his mark.

The Disney cartoon won't tell you this, but in Chapman's time, apples were primarily used for cider, an alcoholic drink. Chapman gathered seeds outside cider mills and packed them aboard an odd- looking two-hulled canoe to float westward down the Ohio River. Staying a few jumps ahead of the advancing frontier, he stopped in likely spots to start nurseries. By the time his seedlings were ready for sale, pioneers eagerly purchased his trees, not only to provide cider, but also to meet land-grant requirements to plant orchards.

Pollan ends with reflections on the contrast between the expanded food choices represented by Johnny Appleseed and the reduced selection that comes with a single-crop approach, known as monoculture. Using genetically modified food as an extreme example of monoculture, the author examines Monsanto's NewLeaf potato, in which genes of a soil bacillus have been spliced into the potato gene to make the plant produce a toxin to destroy pests. Even without his G rating, in this matchup Johnny Appleseed emerges as more wholesome.

Empire Falls, by Richard Russo (Vintage, $14.95). In this comic and moving novel of blue-collar life in a small Maine town, a father's devotion to his fragile teenage daughter provides a sense of direction despite a dead-end job, problems with his estranged wife and demands from the woman who owns most of the town. It won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Man and Boy, by Tony Parsons (Scribner, $12). The single father at the center of this novel struggles to meet the needs of his 4-year- old son and his own aging father.

Shootout with Father, by Marianne Hauser (Fiction Collective Two, $11.95). In this novel, a sculptor seeks to connect with his father by creating miniature versions of the battle armor in his father's collection.

Come on Dad! by Ed Avis (Lobster Press, $9.95) and 101 Secrets a Good Dad Knows, by Walter and Sue Ellin Browder (Rutledge Hill Press, $9.99) These two collections of father-son activities include instructions for whistling through a blade of grass, making paper airplanes and boats and designing a miniature golf course.

MASS MARKETS: Last of the Dixie Heroes, by Peter Abraham (Fawcett,$6.99), a suspense novel centered on the blurring of fantasy with reality by a group of Civil War re-enactors; The Edge of Town, by Dorothy Garlock (Warner, $6.99), a romantic novel set in the 1920s in a Missouri town.; In Harm's Way, by Doug Stanton (St. Martin's, $7.99), a nonfiction account of the sinking of the World War II cruiser USS Indianapolis.