Chip Brantley

In today's Los Angeles Times, Susan Salter Reynolds includes a mini-review of The Perfect Fruit in her "Discoveries" column. It's not online (yet, I hope), but it's short so I'm posting the whole thing here:

Chip Brantley was 27, living in L.A., working as a Web producer in Culver City. He was "skimming the world's muchness," always the best man, never the groom; interested in "surfing, reforestation, orienteering, improv theatre, home brewing, bass guitar, bullfighting" et cetera, et cetera. Two things happened: He fell in love with the woman he would later marry and he fell in love, one day at the Culver City Farmers Market, with a fruit. It was the pluot, a combination plum and apricot, the brainchild of a world famous fruit breeder from the San Joaquin Valley, octogenarian Floyd Zaiger. "When I bit into it," Brantley writes, "it felt almost liquid, like plum jelly." He bought five pounds and found a focus, a thing, a purpose. With great humor, a love of detail and the kind of curiosity that opens one roomful of questions after another, Brantley leads us through the history of plums, the San Joaquin Valley, fruit breeding and the deep connections between food and love.

Reynolds covers two other books, both of which sound very good: Rebecca Brown's new collection of essays, American Romances, and naturalist's David M. Carroll's Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook.