Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

Product Information

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. We co-founded a UK charity, The Equality Trust, to build a social movement for a more equal society, and we are Global Ambassadors for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, an international collaboration of organisations and individuals working to transform economic systems. Sheldrake is a rare scientist who is not afraid to speculate about the truly profound implications of their work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. Not for beginners, but useful for more experienced foragers wishing to expand their mycological identification skills beyond the commonplace and edible.

Viruses and bacteria attract all the attention from microbiologists and fungi are given short shrift in most textbooks. The sixth title in the bestselling Collins Guide series, this book covers the fungi of the British Isles, with considerable relevance for Europe and the wider temperate world. The Book of Fungi takes 600 of the most remarkable fleshy fungi from around the world and reproduces each at its actual size, in full colour, and accompanied by a scientific explanation of its distribution, habitat, association, abundance, growth form, spore colour and edibility. A clear, logical guide to a crucial part of our life support system; the kind of book that most people (including me) really need. In some European nations where gathering fungi has always been a national pastime, cases of poisoning caused by wild fungi are counted in their tens of thousands annually.

You will never walk through a wood in the same way again, now that you're aware of the brilliant mushrooms inhabiting the space, creating their networks, all around you. All around the world—in the sea, in the soil, in the air, and in your body—there are living things so tiny that millions could fit on an ant’s antenna. Conservation organisations are often criticised for using charismatic animals to engage public interest. Despite such apparently unpromising topics, this is a fascinating read, introducing trees that ‘taste’ deer saliva, flirtatious moths, seedling-“suckling” plants and raven-wolf friendships.

The only courses I currently run that people can book individual places on are the fungi sessions in Hemsted Forest.Beatrix studied all sorts of fungi, discovering a mushroom known as the Old Man Of The Woods, but as a female she was prohibited from presenting a scientific paper to London’s Linean Society. Each species here is reproduced at its actual size, in full color, and is accompanied by a scientific explanation of its distribution, habitat, association, abundance, growth form, spore color, and edibility. Her writing is very accessible, with lovely descriptions of the different species and processes, drawing the reader into this “hidden world”.

I don’t yet know what the page count is going to be, but the manuscript is currently in excess of 80,000 words and there will be plenty of illustrations, so it is likely to be quite a big book. The acclaimed and award-winning author and artist of A Hundred Billion Trillion Stars have created a timely—and funny!Approaching the subject with little prior knowledge, I was struck by the sheer depth and intrigue of the information. As an author, podcast host, and community builder, I've connected with other humans with fascinating passions, perspectives, and values.

After going on a local mushroom foraging walk the guide suggested I read this and quite a few other books. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition.

So the book is really the beautifully photographed and organised work of many talented mycologists, and perhaps its only flaw was not to mention and accredit the scores of talented mycologists who helped in its making. However much we think we have understood, this book will make us realise how much we haven’t… After reading it you’ll think, ‘The world is a massively more exciting and colourful and charismatic place than I thought. So engaging is his writing style, that this book would make great bedtime reading – not something i’d say about any other fungi guides (unless you were trying to get to sleep quickly! What makes this book different: The sheer number of fun and unexpected facts will make most people go “Wow!