Book Review: Entangled Life

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake


This book taught me how much I don’t know about mushrooms. It’s basically like the fungal equivalent of “The Secret Life of Trees” when you pick up a book wondering how much there is to learn about such a basic subject and then you get your mind blown. I had no idea how strange and unclassifiable fungus was, and how many truly bizarre ways it could affect both us and other organisms.

There’s an almost obligatory chapter about truffles and truffle hunting, in which Sheldrake describes going on a truffle hunt and the heady aroma of the elusive delicacy. He talks about psychedelic mushrooms and Timothy Leary. He talks about the intriguing new ways in which mushrooms are being used to replace wood, leather, and plastic-based packing materials. He also gives a brief overview of how one “trains” mushrooms to decompose things that don’t decompose easily, such as cigarette butts.

Sheldrake narrated the audiobook himself, and he had a calm but passionate enthusiasm for his subject. He doesn’t just love yeast and fungus for the science and wonder of them; he’s also willing to partake in their bounty, such as ingesting psychedelic mushrooms or tasting homemade alcohol. He eloquently describes how each of them make him feel, comparing the alcohol from differing yeasts and talking about the cider made from apples that fell from the clone of the tree that was in the yard where Issac Newton studied. I kept having the feeling that the author would make a very intriguing dinner guest.

I recommend this book for someone like me, a non-biologist who knows almost nothing about mycology. I found it deeply inspirational, but left feeling that this book just barely scratched the surface of what we know about fungi, which in turn was just a fraction of what there was to know about fungi.




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