Mt. Lebanon Public Library Speaker Series

For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. Pollan is the author of nine books, seven of which have been New York Times bestsellers; four of them (including his latest, This is Your Mind on Plants) were immediate #1 New York Times bestsellers. Previous books include How to Change Your Mind (2019), Cooked (2013), Food Rules (2009), In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), which was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award for best food writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A revised, young readers’ edition of The Omnivore’s Dilemma was published in 2015. Pollan's 2001 book, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, also a New York Times bestseller, was recognized as a best book of the year by the American Booksellers Association and Amazon.com. Pollan is also the author of A Place of My Own (1997) and Second Nature (1991). An expanded edition of Food Rules, with original illustrations by Maira Kalman, was published in 2011. How to Change Your Mind was named one of the New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2018, and in 2022 was adapted into a critically successful four-part docuseries for Netflix. In 2020 he published a new audio book titled Caffeine, available from Audible. His most recent book, This is Your Mind on Plants, an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants and the taboos we place on them, was a New York Times bestseller and one of the Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2021.