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Category: Reviews of my Books

Citrus review by Chronicle of Higher Education

Published by qdsa on June 25, 2008

NOTA BENE
‘Citrus: A History’

By NINA C. AYOUB

Mining peel, pith, and pulp, Citrus: A History (University of Chicago Press) is new from Pierre Laszlo, a chemist who enjoys a cultural ramble.

As with his 2001 book on salt, Mr. Laszlo takes a single subject down many paths, among them botany, commerce, exploration, art, literature, perfumery, cuisine, and a little autobiography. The author recalls a French childhood of “minimal fruit diversity.” Even past the deprivations of World War II, citrus was a treat for the holidays, says the scholar, now an emeritus professor at Belgium’s University of Liège.

Citrus first spread from Asia, he says, with the Indian conquests of Alexander the Great. Mr. Laszlo links aspects of its further spread and survival to religious groups. In the Mediterranean region, he writes, the Jewish diaspora ringed that sea with citrus as Jews preserved the seeds of a lemonlike fruit essential for autumn’s Sukkot celebrations. Later, Muslims established a lasting presence for citrus in Moorish Iberia. Tracing Spanish and Portuguese explorations, the author follows citrus from Old World to New, most notably to Brazil in the early 1500s. There, the story goes, a convict castaway from a Portuguese ship fathered both Brazilian citriculture and dozens of children with indigenous women.

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Citrus review by Haaretz

Published by qdsa on June 23, 2008

Subscribe to Print Edition | Thu., March 06, 2008 Adar1 29, 5768 | | Israel Time: 17:25 (EST+7)

Pure gold
By Ronit Vered

In the beginning there were apparently only three: the etrog (citron), the pomelo and the mandarin. Today there are dozens of fruits and thousands of species of citrus fruit in the world, but modern genetic research indicates only these three as the family’s original primeval ancestors. In ancient times, the three existed in nature as wild trees; all the rest are the product of mutations that occurred by chance and received enthusiastic encouragement from mankind, or hybrids – the product of crossbreeding among the various species.

Some of the mutations and the crossbreeding took place very early. The orange, recorded in Chinese culture over 1,000 years ago, is the product of crossbreeding a mandarin with a pomelo. Some of them are later developments: The grapefruit, which appeared in the Caribbean in the 17th century, is the product of crossbreeding a pomelo with an orange. The Clementine is one of the babies in the family, and not only due to its size. It is named after the person considered its inventor, Father Clement Rodier, a French missionary who was sent to Algeria in the 19th century to bring the Gospel to the Muslims. But even when it comes to a fruit that came into the world relatively close to our own times (between 1892 and 1904), it is not easy to separate myth from fact. Nobody can say with certainty whether the monk and his colleagues in the order, who ran an orphanage, came across the mutation spontaneously or were involved in crossbreeding and therefore invented the Clementine.

Pierre Laszlo, a French professor of chemistry, has written a fascinating book in which he tries to trace the spread of citrus fruits in the world. This journey passes through marvelous stops along the way. There are the etrog orchards of the Levant, which spread because of religion, in this case Judaism. There is the story of the scurvy- stricken fleet of British Admiral George Anson, who embarked on a trip around the world in the 18th century with six ships and 2,000 sailors in order to prevent Spanish domination of the commercial routes. The fleet returned with one ship and fewer than 200 sailors, because his competitors were aware of the strategic-economic value of the secret of curing scurvy – lemon juice – and denied Anson and his men the simple treatment.

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Pourquoi la mer est-elle bleue?

Published by qdsa on April 12, 2008

relevé la question suivante, sur le site de “La main à la pâte”; la réponse de DW s’inspire du livre, qu’elle paraphrase:

04/02/2002 question de Priscilla Pilarek, enseignante en cycle 3 à l’école Joliot-Curie (62), priscy@wanadoo.fr Un enfant m’a demandé pourquoi la mer est bleue. Je lui ai répondu qu’en fait, la mer est transparente, mais que la ciel se reflétait dans la mer. C’est alors qu’il m’a demandé pourquoi le ciel est bleu, et plus précisément pourquoi il est coloré. Je vous soumets donc cette question.

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