RaveThe Guardian (UK)Sheldrake carries us easily into these questions with ebullience and precision ... He moves smoothly between stories, scientific descriptions and philosophical issues ... Appropriately, Sheldrake is tentative in these descriptions, and offers a range of terms and metaphors, for none seems exactly right. Each articulation seems either too anthropomorphic or too reductive. Some expressions attribute too much intelligence, choice or even feeling to the mycelium; some too little. Sheldrake is feeling his way towards new vocabularies and concepts ... A \'door-opener\' book is one with a specialist subject in which it finds pathways leading everywhere. This is a genre devoted to connectedness in all directions, and is one well suited to our times. Sheldrake’s book is a very fine example.
Peter Wohlleben, Trans. by Jane Billinghurst
MixedThe Guardian...The Inner Life of Animals does not have quite the power to surprise that the tree book did. And there is not quite the same atmosphere of place ...stories are more dispersed than in the tree book, more loosely related. There is not the same concentration of light and colour. But the book is always fascinating ... Voice more than place holds the stories together. Wry, avuncular, careful and kind, Wohlleben guides us from one creature to the next ... Each story adds to a widening vision of intelligence, emotion and relationship ... The book’s impulse throughout is a willingness to value all forms of life quite as far as is humanly possible.
