This salute to the apple traces its origins in Kazakhstan, offers myths and stories about the fruit, lists its different varieties, and includes some recipes Apple grower and journalist Browning explores all aspects of the popular fruit. First he travels to the apple forests of Kazakhstan, where apples probably originated, to visit a scientist who studies and preserves these ancient forests; then he relates world myths, legends, and the apple's significance in religion. Browning next details the high-tech world of apple genetics at the USDA's apple germ-plasm repository and apple-breeding techniques at Cornell's breeding facility in Geneva, NY. Finally, he writes about the businesses of apple growing and cider making. Woven throughout are accounts of Browning's experiences growing up on an apple orchard and his life as an orchardist. Appendixes include the best cooking and eating apples, brief backyard orchard information, and a few apple recipes. While Browning presents more details about apples than the average reader may care to know, his book would be a nice resource for students doing a report on apples or who need a collection of interesting apple facts. Recommended for public libraries and academic agricultural collections.?Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove P.L., IL Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Browning was raised in Kentucky, where his parents grew apples for a living and where Browning and his brother now press cider. He combines facts and fiction in tracing the history of this popular fruit. It supposedly started with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (good-bye, paradise!), and the author relates a number of tree-of-life myths involving the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, French, and Scandinavians. He discusses the fruit's origins (in Kazakhstan on the slopes of the Heavenly Mountains), genetics, biotech breeding programs, and cider making (one of Thomas Jefferson's two orchards at Monticello was exclusively for cider apples). There is a list of 20 prize apples with notes on their origins, uses, and characteristics, and a list of apple trees suitable for backyard orchards, divided into three broad categories: dwarf or bush, semidwarfs, and semistandard. There are also a few delicious recipes from around the world, including apple fritters, apple dumplings, apple cake, and other delights. George Cohen commercialand comes away with a winner. Browning (The Culture of Desire, 1993, etc.) may be a Kentucky apple farmer, but he is foremost an apple fancier. Here he treats readers to an exploration of the apple through time and space and culture, from the names as lovely as any butterfly'sWhite Winter Pearmain, Black Twigs, Chisel Jerseyto the maladies of the red-banded leaf roller, red mites, and fungi. Restless and curious, Browning flies to Kazakhstan to investigate what is perhaps the world's original apple forest and conjures the very appleness of the place. He delves deeply into the ancient symbolism of the apple: its proximity to peril and immortality; the perfect pentagram formed by its five pips, which was sacred not only to Christianity but to sorcery as well; the wassail rituals; the divine associations and the ebb and flow between early Nordic and Greco-Roman tree spirits. He makes lightly spun, intelligible forays into genetic fingerprinting of pomological pedigrees, and he delivers a quick history of Washington State apple growing and the sad circumstances that resulted in its planting mostly the Red Delicious, inoffensive but bland. And since he is a cider man himself, he tells the story of cider's rise and fall and modest rise again, as experienced by contemporary artisan producers in Normandy, France, and Somerset Levels, England. His quest for the perfect apple to make his ciderthe real stuff, with its dark, rich, moody smell of autumntakes him on one more of his strange journeys, to an old hill farm in Kentucky, where he tracks down a relict Taliaferro apple tree and samples a homespun cider that sends him swooning. An exceptional popular studyright up there with John McPhee's Orangesthat is often as exquisite as its subject. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Frank Browning, whose previous books include The Culture of Desire and A Queer Geography (Noonday, 1998), grows apples and ferments cider in Wallingford, Kentucky. He also reports for National Public Radio from New York City. Used Book in Good Condition