Apples

"I was raised surrounded by apples." So begins Frank Browning's account of his lifelong fascination with the fruit his parents grew in their orchard in the Appalachian hills of Kentucky.

Throughout Western memory, the apple has been the fruit of trouble, temptation, and immortality. Paris and the Trojan War. Nordic Loki and the apples of eternal life. And, of course, that troubled couple in the garden. Browning leads us on a beguiling journey through the primal myths of the world's most popular fruit and then explains that the first apples really appeared in Kazakhstan on the slopes of the Heavenly Mountains. From the apple's origins in antiquity to its reinvention by the alchemists of genetic engineering, from its niche in the global marketplace to its fiery transformations in the pot stills of France, Browning shows us how this mysterious fruit of the tree of all knowledge continues to tempt and delight us.