From Booklist
Young's engaging and scholarly book examines the natural history of cacao and its transformation into a cultivated crop of ancient and modern peoples and its ecological connections to the rain forest. Young points out that cacao is among a handful of New World tropical plants that, due to the Spanish conquest of Central America in the late fifteenth century, became a bridge between two distinct spheres of humankind: Western culture and society on one hand, and the ancient and indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica on the other. The author spent a great deal of time researching cacao pollination, and concludes that successful natural pollination of cacao is linked to the ecology of the tropical rain forest, and that the ties between cacao and the rain forest bode well for the future of both economic development and biological conservation in the lowland tropics. George Cohen
