The Sakura Obsession

Ellen Archer narrates this audiobook with grace and precision. In addition, Englishman Nicholas Guy Smith delivers the long quotations from the story's protagonist, Collingwood Ingram. The dual approach adds to this evocative and engrossing historical biography of the English plant collector whose passion for Japanese flowering cherry trees saved Japan's most indelible species when industrialization, war, and pollution threatened to destroy them. Ingram, a self-taught botanist, ornithologist, and aficionado of Sakura (cherry blossoms), preserved the once extinct Taihaku (Giant White). Author Naoko Abe, a Japanese journalist based in England, celebrates a most worthwhile life and gives the listener a primer on Japanese culture and history while telling the story of the richly symbolic cherry tree. A.D.M. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine