The Light Eaters By Zoe Schlanger

The contemporary world of botany is divided over the matter of how plants sense the world and whether they can be said to communicate. But research in recent decades has prompted the question that animates Schlanger’s book: Are plants intelligent? Schlanger writes about scientists who are studying how plants change their shape and respond to sound, how they use electricity to convey information, how they send one another chemical signals. Along the way, she becomes a sort of anthropologist of botanists. The book’s focus on the researchers themselves overcomes a challenge inherent to science writing: where to find drama. “The Light Eaters” is a special piece of science writing for the way it solves the genre’s bind; it doesn’t force people or their findings into narrative engines. Instead, the field of botany itself functions like a character, one undergoing a potentially radical change, with all the excitement, discomfort, and uncertainty that transformation brings. The book’s power comes from showing a field in flux and reminding us that ideas have their own life cycles: from crackpot theory to utter embarrassment to real possibility to the stuff of textbooks.