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 The A
List
By Ptolemy Tomkins
A Rose by Any Name
By Douglas Brenner and Stephen Scanniello
Algonquin
“Only
connect,” wrote E.M. Forster in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End.
Those two simple words sum up a profound truth about the world: The more we know
about it, the more we see how endlessly and intricately everything in it is
related to everything else.
A Rose
by Any Name has
information on all the topics you’d expect in a book about roses: the history of
rose gardens, the culinary and medicinal uses of different roses…. There’s even
a recipe for rose water. But—as the title suggests—the authors are concerned
above all with how the more than fifteen thousand varieties of roses out there
got their names. The authors had originally planed to tell the individual
histories of only about four-dozen different species. But by the time they’d
finished, they’d told the stories behind a lot more roses than that, and written
about a whole lot of other things besides. From Native American mythology (the
Cherokee Rose) to the strategies behind Madison Avenue product marketing (The
Tupperware Rose) to the Opium Wars in China (Fortune’s Five-Colored Rose), A
Rose by Any Name tells the story of the world’s favorite flower while
showing that—as Forster could have told them—you can’t really talk about roses
without talking about the whole wide world.
Get your own copy
here.
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