Customer Reviews

Pomegranate Roads: A Soviet Botanist's Exile from Eden

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Some chapters of this book make you feel like you've just watched an Indiana Jones movie, while other chapters would make a great NOVA science episode. On his scientific treasure hunt for exotic pomegranates, Dr.Gregory Levin has--unassumingly-- run into vipers dancing on their tails, and seen cave paintings of kangaroos on the border of Iran and Turkmenistan! Levin knows which godesses were idolized in pomegranates and what the penalty was for felling a pomegranate tree in ancient Egypt. Yet the tone of this adventure is deeply thoughtful. In 1941 when young Levin and his parents were digging trenches around Leningrad in preparation for the seige, Levin watched a drift of butterflies land on a nearby tree. "Their life cycle was ending," Levin says,"and they had all landed on the tree to die. The tree was their cemetary." Here's an author who sees reflections of the human condition in Nature all around us. And like a good hiking companion he doesn't keep pointing things out, but leaves you alone to take it all in for yourself.

Ari Siletz, author of "The Mullah With No Legs and Other Stories."

I purchased this book primarily to learn about pomegranates as I am in the process of planting a small orchard of pomegranates. I found it to be a wonderful history lesson and an adventure. I am planting several of Dr. Levin's cultivars and have a great appreciation for all of the work he carried out for some 40 years, often at great risk of life. I often felt I was on these adventures and now wonder if I could ever participate in some exploratory treks. It's painful to read how the research stations have been bulldozed and wish more of the 1,117 cultivars could be rescued. It was hard to put this book down and I now have a much greater appreciation for being able to grow some of Dr. Levin's cultivars. I only hope I can do them justice!

Pomegranate Roads is a one of a kind memoir that reflects the history of Soviet Science, the botany and culture of pomegranates, the personal history of an intrepid explorer and botanist who worked his entire life in the remote areas of Central Asia and the Caucasus to collect and protect the species. Dr. Levin created the world's largest pomegranate collection, 1117 accessions, in Turkmenistan before the collapse of the USSR and his exile. He describes just about everything you'd want to know from the range of tastes and health benefits to all the myths and stories. As he writes, "I was fortunate to have met the pomegrnate early in my life, to have been attuned to its energy, and to have my thoughts and deeds dedicated to it for many years." A great book about planet pomegranate.

Written by Dr. Gregory M. Levin, Pomegranate Roads: A Soviet Botanist's Exile from Eden is part memoir, part botanist's testimony to a lifetime devoted to researching, collecting, and striving to better understand the humble yet delicious pomegranate. The collapse of the Soviet Union left Levin cut off from his remote Soviet agricultural station and considering himself effectively "exiled from Eden". From the lore of the fruit that tempted Persephone and possibly Adam and Eve, to Levin's trek across Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus in search of wild and endangered pomegranates, to tidbits of folklore to health benefits to pharmaceuticals connected to the pomegranate, Pomegranate Roads truly astonishes the reader with the many secrets of a seemingly ordinary edible fruit. A handful of black-and-white photographs and an inset section of color plates illustrate this one-of-a-kind celebration of the pomegranate, written as much for lay readers as for fellow botanists.

Wow. This book makes me long for my grad school days. What an inspired story of scientific pursuit, history, evolution, ethnobotany, and the love of pomegranates. I love this book so much I want to eat it. This is a must read. He includes detailed descriptions of plant guilds that would grow well in dry places and some information that could lead readers to find sources of pomegranate germplasm. I love how he weaves his story together. The botanical terminology makes my heart flutter! I want to visit the places he's been. Reading this book right now is especially poignant as many place names he uses have been on the news as sites of bombing and military action. I wish it were not so and this book gives me greater depth of appreciation for the history, ecology, and beauty of these areas.

I was expecting just information about pomegranates. Boy did I have pleasant surprise. Pomegranate Roads not only gets the the 'ole taste buds salivating, but it also provides amazing insight into a man with a great passion for his work. Equally impressive is the historical perspective of the fall of the USSR and what it did to this small part of biological diversity as well as the cultural impacts. An excellent memoir unto itself.

If you are curious about pomegranates, this is the book for you! Even if you do not eat them or grow them, this is a wonderful story about human passion.

Book Review: Pomegranate Roads



Published in San Diego Chapter New, California Rare Fruit Growers, October 2006 by Dave Silverstein

Last month's newsletter mentioned the book, "Pomegranate Roads" which has just come out. It was put together from interviews and unpublished materials from Dr. Gregory Levin. Dr. Levin is the Russian botanist who built the huge Pomegranate collection at the TurkmenistanExperimental Station in Garrigala. From the 1960s through the fall of the Soviet Union he collected well over 1000 varieties of Pomegranate, not to mention stone fruits, grapes and nuts indigenous to central Asia. He is the one responsible for the bulk of the pomegranate varieties in the collection of the USDA's pomegranate Germplasm collection.

The book is full of fascinating Pomegranate and other botanical lore. But it is a memoir primarily. The lore is all set against the ferocious tragedy that is 20th century history, especially as experienced from inside the former Soviet Union. Oh the humanity! As I put it: I came for the Pomegranate botany, but stayed for the human story. I recommend
the book. though I'm only 2/3 of the way through it. And the whole collection has basically been sacrificed at this point by the myopic dictatorship that runs independent post-Soviet Turkemistan. It is a tragedy, mitigated somewhat by the varieties that Dr. Levin placed with the USDA germplasm repository system. (We, the CRFG, are now a vital link in maintaining those varieties.) by David Silverstein