20 January 2021
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
There is a lifeform so strange and wondrous that it forces us to rethink how life works…
Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation.
In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence’, and can manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.
Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into this hidden kingdom of life, and shows that fungi are key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.
| Title | : | Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures |
| Edition Language | : | English |
| ISBN | : | 9780525510314 |
| Format Type | : |
Readers Also Enjoyed Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
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Instagram || Twitter || Facebook || Amazon || PinterestOkay, before I even get into this review, how perfect is this guy's name? Not only does he study mushrooms, he has a name like a professor in ...
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I have always found mushrooms magical. The way they suddenly appear overnight after a rainstorm amazes me. Walk down a forest path one day and see nothing. The next morning, suddenly you encounter hun...
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I have a life-long love for and fascination with mushrooms. Partially because they are delicious, but I also remember finding them almost magical when I was a kid: they could appear overnight, had the...
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4.5 This book, is a perfect length for the content, just enough to feel sated, and it’s organized into sections of thought from1) how mushroom trips can rewire the neural pathways in your brain to a...
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Some books deserve all the stars in the world, Entangled Life being one of them. I’ve read quite a few science books so far, and in each of them I have found something to fascinate me. But none of t...
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"We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is constantly passing."Things that delighted me: – 2 citations from Braiding Sweetgrass by ...
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Let's start with some music, appropriately "Women Gathering Mushrooms", a recording of the Aka people living in the forests of the Central African Republic. It's an example of musical polyphony. Polyp...
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Merlin Sheldrake, the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future, kindly sent me an advance copy and asked for comment. It is due to be published this ...
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Lots of drawn-out writing, especially about anthropomorphization and linguistic issues. Not so much science. Do we have the wrong metaphors for fungi and plants? I couldn't care less. It is easy to wr...
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Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures is an up-to-date book about fungi and everything fungal. It's so beautifully written that I sometimes forget it's a sci...