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Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures Paperback – April 13, 2021
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“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave.
In the first edition of this mind-bending book, Sheldrake introduced us to this mysterious but massively diverse kingdom of life. This exquisitely designed volume, abridged from the original, features more than one hundred full-color images that bring the spectacular variety, strangeness, and beauty of fungi to life as never before.
Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how life works.
Winner of the Wainwright Prize, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, and the Guild of Food Writers Award • Shortlisted for the British Book Award • Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House Trade Paperbacks
- Publication dateApril 13, 2021
- Dimensions5.1 x 0.85 x 7.9 inches
- ISBN-10052551032X
- ISBN-13978-0525510321
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A gorgeous book of literary nature writing, ripe with insight and erudition. . . . Food for the soul.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Nearly every page of this book contained either an observation so interesting or a turn of phrase so lovely that I was moved to slow down, stop, and re-read. . . . [Entangled Life] reminded me that fungi are, like the Universe, sublime.”—Science
“An exuberant introduction to the biology, ecology, climatology, and psychopharmacology of the earth’s ‘metabolic wizards.’”—Harpers Magazine
“A poetic, mind-bending tour of the fungal world.”—Scientific American
“Wondrous . . . Humans should consider fungi among the greatest of earth’s marvels.”—Time (Books of the Year)
“An astonishing book.”—The Observer
“Completely mind-blowing.”—The Sunday Times
“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
“I fell in love with this book. Merlin Sheldrake is a scientist with the imagination of a poet and a beautiful writer.”—Michael Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind (Bay Area Book Festival, 2020)
“A magical journey deep into the roots of Nature by an expert storyteller . . . a must-read.”—Paul Stamets, author of Mycelium Running
“Reading this book, I felt surrounded by a web of wonder. The natural world is more fantastic than any fantasy, so long as you have the means to perceive it. This book provides the means.”—Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget
“Urgent, astounding, and necessary.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
“Dazzling, vibrant, vision changing.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland
“Gorgeous.”—Margaret Atwood, author of The Testaments
About the Author
winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Sheldrake is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A Lure
Who’s pimping who?—Prince
A heap of Piedmont white truffles (Tuber magnatum) sat on the scales on a check-patterned rag. They were scruffy, like unwashed stones; irregular, like potatoes; socketed, like skulls. Two kilograms: €12,000. Their sweet funk filled the room, and in this aroma was their value. It was unabashed and quite unlike anything else: a lure, thick and confusing enough to get lost in.
It was early November, the height of truffle season, and I had traveled to Italy to join two truffle hunters working out of the hills around Bologna. I was lucky. A friend of a friend knew a man who dealt truffles. The dealer had agreed to set me up with his two best hunters, who in turn had consented to let me go out with them. White-truffle hunters are famously secretive. These fungi have never been domesticated and can only be found in the wild.
Truffles are the underground fruiting bodies of several types of mycorrhizal fungi. For most of the year, truffle fungi exist as mycelial networks, sustained in part by the nutrients they obtain from the soil and also by the sugars they draw from plant roots. However, their subterranean habitat confronts them with a basic problem. Truffles are spore-producing organs, analogous to the seed-producing fruit of a plant. Spores evolved to allow fungi to disperse themselves, but underground their spores can’t be caught by air currents and are invisible to the eyes of animals.
Their solution is to smell. But to smell above the olfactory racket of a forest is no small task. Forests are crisscrossed with smells, each a potential fascination or distraction to an animal nose. Truffles must be pungent enough for their scent to penetrate the layers of soil and enter the air, distinctive enough for an animal to take note amid the ambient smellscape, and delicious enough for that animal to seek it out, dig it up, and eat it. Every visual disadvantage that truffles face—being entombed in the soil, difficult to spot once unearthed, and visually unappealing once spotted—they make up for with smell.
Once eaten, a truffle’s job is done: An animal has been lured into exploring the soil and recruited to carry the fungus’s spores off to a new place and deposit them in its feces. A truffle’s allure is thus the outcome of hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary entanglement with animal tastes. Natural selection will favor truffle fungi that match the preferences of their finest spore dispersers. Truffles with better “chemistry” will attract animals more successfully than those with worse. Like the orchids that mimic the appearance of sexually receptive female bees, truffles provide a depiction of animal tastes—an evolutionary portrait in scent of animal fascination.
I was in Italy because I wanted to be drawn underground by a fungus into the chemical world in which it lived. We are ill-equipped to participate in the chemical lives of fungi, but ripe truffles speak a language so piercing and simple that even we can understand it. In doing so, these fungi include us for a moment within their chemical ecology. How should we think about the torrents of interaction that occur between organisms underground? How should we understand these spheres of more-than-human communication? Perhaps running after a dog hot on the trail of a truffle and burying my face in the soil was as close as I could get to the chemical tug and promise that fungi use to conduct so many aspects of their lives.
The human sense of smell is extraordinary. Our eyes can distinguish several million colors, our ears can distinguish half a million tones, but our noses can distinguish well over a trillion different odors. Humans can detect virtually all volatile chemicals ever tested. We outperform rodents and dogs in detecting certain odors, and we can follow scent trails. Smells feature in our choice of sexual partners and in our ability to detect fear, anxiety, or aggression in others. And smell is woven into the fabric of our memories; it is common for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder to have olfactory flashbacks.
Noses are finely tuned instruments. Your olfactory sense can split complex mixtures into their constituent chemicals, just as a prism can split white light into its constituent colors. To do this, it must detect the precise arrangement of atoms within a molecule. Mustard smells mustardy because of bonds between nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur. Fish smells fishy because of bonds between nitrogen and hydrogen. Bonds between carbon and nitrogen smell metallic and oily.
The ability to detect and respond to chemicals is a primordial sensory ability. Most organisms use their chemical senses to explore and make sense of their environment. Plants, fungi, and animals all use similar types of receptors to detect chemicals. When molecules bind to these receptors, they trigger a signaling cascade: One molecule triggers a cellular change, which triggers a bigger change, and so on. In this way, small causes can ripple into large effects: Human noses can detect some compounds at as low a concentration as thirty-four thousand molecules in one square centimeter, the equivalent of a single drop of water in twenty thousand Olympic swimming pools.
For an animal to experience a smell, a molecule must land on their olfactory epithelium. In humans, this is a membrane up and behind the nose. The molecule binds to a receptor, and nerves fire. The brain gets involved as chemicals are identified or trigger thoughts and emotional responses. Fungi are equipped with different kinds of bodies. They don’t have noses or brains. Instead, their entire surface behaves like an olfactory epithelium. A mycelial network is one large chemically sensitive membrane: A molecule can bind to a receptor anywhere on its surface and trigger a signaling cascade that alters fungal behavior.
Fungi live their lives bathed in a rich field of chemical information. Truffle fungi use chemicals to communicate to animals their readiness to be eaten; they also use chemicals to communicate with plants, animals, other fungi—and themselves. It isn’t possible to understand fungi without exploring these sensory worlds, but they are hard for us to interpret. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Like fungi, we spend much of our lives being drawn toward things. We know what it is to be attracted or repelled. Through smell, we can participate in the molecular discourse fungi use to organize much of their existence.
In human history, truffles have long been associated with sex. The word for truffle in many languages translates to “testicle,” as in the old Castilian turmas de tierra, or earth’s testicles. Truffle fungi have evolved to make animals giddy because their lives depend on it. As I spoke with Charles Lefevre, a truffle scientist and cultivator in Oregon, about his work with the Périgord black truffle, he broke off: “Funny—as I’m saying this I am ‘bathing’ in the virtual aroma of Tuber melanosporum. It’s as if a cloud of it is filling my office, but there are currently no truffles here. These olfactory flashbacks are common with truffles in my experience. They can even include visual and emotional memories.”
In France, Saint Anthony—the patron saint of lost objects—is regarded as the patron saint of truffles, and truffle masses are celebrated in his honor. Prayers do little to stop the skulduggery. Cheap truffles are stained or flavored to pass them off as their more valuable cousins. Prized truffle forests are targeted by truffle poachers. Expertly trained dogs worth thousands of euros are stolen. Poisoned meat is strewn around woods to kill the dogs of rival hunters. In 2010, in a crime of passion, a French truffle farmer, Laurent Rambaud, shot dead a truffle thief he encountered while patrolling his truffle orchards during the night. Following his arrest, two hundred and fifty supporters marched in support of Rambaud’s right to defend his crop, angry at the rise in thefts of both truffles and truffle dogs. The deputy head of the Tricastin truffle growers’ union told La Provence newspaper that he had advised fellow producers never to patrol their fields with a gun because “the temptation is too high.” Lefevre put it well: “Truffles bring out the dark side of people. It’s like money lying on the ground, but it’s perishable and mercurial.”
Product details
- Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (April 13, 2021)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 052551032X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525510321
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.1 x 0.85 x 7.9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Mushrooms in Biological Sciences
- #10 in Ecology (Books)
- #213 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Learn more about Merlin at www.merlinsheldrake.com, and follow him on Twitter (@MerlinSheldrake) or Instagram (@merlin.sheldrake).
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Is it full of fascinating facts about fungi? Certainly. But it was actually the writing that made reading this book such a joy. Sheldrake's prose is lively and clever, but above all it is richly sensual--something you don't usually find in scientific non-fiction. There is an earthiness and intimacy, even a subtle eroticism, that befits the subject matter, and conjures a sense of vicarious experience. If you didn't think lichens were sexy before, Sheldrake will persuade you.
Enmeshed (dare one say like fungal hyphae?) with the bare facts is another, more introspective narrative about Sheldrake's own evolution as a scientist and a person, via his deepening relationship with his subject. Indeed, relationality is a theme that repeatedly emerges in this work; evidently, it is something fungi can teach us a lot about. While many scientists undoubtedly grow through their relationships with their research subjects, in my experience few are reflective enough to realize it, let alone lean into it and write a book about it.
Highly recommended for mushroom nerds, fans of fungal medicine, ecologists, animists, and all symbionts alike.
This is not my field of study, but no matter how ignorant you might be in biology or fungi, I guarantee you will find him easy to follow and you’ll come to appreciate how valuable and necessary are fungi to the life of a forest or a field or anywhere really. Our earth is now at risk and fungi play a vital role - as you will come to learn. Read it!
In his introduction, using the language of his friend and mentor David Abram, Sheldrake diffracts his narrative through the prism of phenomenology. “Our perceptions work in large part by expectations. It takes less cognitive effort to make sense of the world using preconceived images updated with a small amount of new sensory information than to constantly form entirely new perceptions from scratch…Tricked out of our expectations, we fall back on our senses."
On first glance, you might think that this is a book about fungi. And in a way, it is—as much as you might say that an oil painting is about paint and canvas. And yet, just like the painter, Sheldrake uses his medium of mycelium to illustrate not just the qualities of a natural kingdom, but to paint the icon of a new paradigm. In the world of “Entangled Life,” Sheldrake’s portraits dissolve the veil that normally crisply define the thresholds of individual organisms. Given that your corporeal subsistence as a human is reliant on yeasts (a form of fungi), both to maintain your microbiome, and to pre-digests your food, where do you end, and where does the fungal kingdom begin? Given that trees are unable to access the water and nutrients they need to thrive without mycelial networks, is it useful to refer to an individual tree as an organism, or must we expand our definition to include its fungal partners? To use the terminology of J. G. Bennett, maybe even the concept of individuality begins only at the scale of the species.
Sheldrake has PhD in ecology, and relies upon a scientific epistemology to construct and buttress his rhetoric. And yet where much of science hones in at the order of mechanism, to the degree that we lose the forrest in the trees, Sheldrake employs science in a way that invites in our somatic selves and leaves us awed by the synergies dancing our eyes and branching beneath our feet.
Like the effects of the psilocybin mushrooms which Sheldrake describes, this book can serve as a portal through our drab mental models into the vibrant, bustling, sonorous, and pungent world that has been longing for our attention.
I loved the illustration and all the work that was put into it and it’s a great piece of literature if you know anyone who’s a fun-guy!
Top reviews from other countries
Very engagingly written entertaining, informative but not stuffy…..basically I liked it 😀