Oranges

Oranges - Paperback Oranges
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Hardcover: 0-374-22688-1; $20.00US
Paperback: 0-374-51297-3; $10.00US

This book is essentially surprising. It is non-fiction and its subject is the botany, history, and industry of oranges. It was first conceived as a short magazine article about oranges and orange juice, but the author kept encountering so much irresistible information that he eventually found that he had in fact written a book. It contains sketches of orange growers, orange botanists, orange pickers, orange packers, early settlers on Florida's Indian River, the first orange barons, modern concentrate makers, and a fascinating profile of Ben Hill Griffin of Frostproof, Florida who may be the last of the individual orange barons.

Oranges developed in Southeast Asia, and they spread through the world with a timing closely parallel to the spread of civilization. Thus, for example, it was Columbus himself who brought the first orange seeds to the New World. Invading Moors had earlier introduced them to Spain. Oranges played a significant and symbolic part in the work of the painters of the Italian Renaissance, and, in earlier centuries, at least two invasions of Italy were touched off by gifts of oranges temptingly sent to warlords in the north. Oranges were the Golden Apples of the Hesperides.

Botanically, they are spectacularly complicated. They can be completely unripe when they are a brilliant orange and deliciously ripe when they are as green as emeralds. An orange grown on one side of a tree is better than an orange grown on the other side. Citrus is so genetically perverse that oranges can grow from lime seeds. Most California lemons grow on orange roots. Most Florida oranges grow on lemon roots.

Oranges - Hardcover Mr. McPhee's astonishing book has an almost narrative progression, is immensely readable, and is frequently amusing. Louis XIV hung tapestries of oranges in the halls of Versailles, because oranges and orange trees were the symbols of his nature and his reign. This book, in a sense, is a tapestry of oranges, too--with elements in it that range from the great orangeries of European monarchs to a custom of people in the modern Caribbean who split oranges and clean floors with them, one half in each hand.

Reviews

It is a delicious book, in a word, and more absorbing than many a novel. --Roderick Cook, Harper's

Fascinating. A sterling example of what a fresh point of view, a clear style, a sense of humor and diligent investigation can do to reveal the inherent interest in something as taken-for-granted as your morning orange juice. --Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal