You’ve read it, right? Or seen it on the shelf? Or the bestseller list? How it got there is part of the story. Milkweed, a small nonprofit press in Minneapolis, published it in 2013 with no marketing budget, and for years nothing happened. Then readers started handing it to each other. It hit the bestseller list seven years out and stayed, sold millions, and made Kimmerer a MacArthur fellow. The book itself is quieter than the phenomenon. She’s a botanist, a professor of plant ecology, and a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, and her argument is that both ways of knowing a plant belong in the same room. So she walks you through the study showing sweetgrass grows better when it’s harvested, then tells the Skywoman story, then what her elders said about asking permission before you take. Reciprocity is the spine: A gift puts you under obligation, which is the opposite of buying something.