Andrew Lack is a lecturer in biology at Oxford Brookes University. His previous books include Redbreast: The Robin in Life and Literature (2008), Instant Notes in Plant Biology, with David Evans (2005), and The Natural History of Pollination, with Michael Proctor and Peter Yeo (1996).
The illustrations are spaced perfectly with the text so that as a page is turned, the appropriate image appears. The illustrations never appear too early or too late. Amazing! . . . The index is modest and shows twenty-seven varieties of poppies--a tribute to the author's thoroughness. . . . Along with the editor's care in layout, the paper stock choice, and the portability of the book, all validate the neo-Luddites' claim that physical books still matter. -- Choice Gorgeously illustrated. . . . Poppy ranges widely in both period and subject, from Assyrian carvings of poppy capsules and Claude Monet's impressionist paintings of poppy fields to the use of poppy seed in modern cooking, and the grim ironies of the twenty-first-century Afghan opium trade. But the book is probably at its strongest with the science of poppies, particularly their botany. How fascinating to know that as the corn poppy spread from its presumed origin in the eastern Mediterranean northwards into Europe, it changed both its method of pollination from beetles to bees and its color: and that these two facts are interrelated by natural selection. -- Lancet