... ebullient and ambitious ... Sheldrake’s book is full of striking examples like these, prying open our cramped perspectives. He offers motley quotations, all of them enigmatic yet pertinent, from figures as varied as Tom Waits and the French feminist Hélène Cixous ... This book may not be a psychedelic — and unlike Sheldrake, I haven’t dared to consume my copy (yet) — but reading it left me not just moved but altered, eager to disseminate its message of what fungi can do.
While fungi are easy sources of wonder, getting to the wonder means understanding the basics, which can be arcane in the case of fungi. Sheldrake carefully explains the details in clever, affable prose. His book has a host of other strengths as well. It emphasizes the openness and indeterminacy of mycology, a vastly understudied field, through honest depictions of scientists in the lab and field trying to puzzle out fungi’s unexplained behavior. Sheldrake also shows how culture shapes scientific knowledge ... He embraces the sort of fantastic speculations that come with the territory, as when a childhood memory of Terence McKenna, the ethnobotanist, mystic, and family friend, segues to McKenna’s fantastic theories about the extraterrestrial origins of fungi. But ultimately the book remains grounded in empirical evidence. Sheldrake is stylistically impressive, too—he can be charmingly poetic, using metaphors and analogies to communicate meaning ... Although Entangled Life never lapses into polemics or preaching, the book has an evangelical message all the same ... The book is a call to engage with fungi on their level.
More than anything else, Entangled Life is an ode to other ways of being ... I finished the book eager to ferment anything and everything, dig through soil, and go out and sniff mushrooms ... full of details, but Sheldrake tends to use those details to reveal broader truths ... I have been working on and reading and writing about fungi for a decade. And yet, 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 reread ... It is easy, as a biologist, to grow numb to nature: numbed by the ones and zeroes of spreadsheets, numbed by emails and virtual meetings. This book rocked me into remembering that nature, especially fungal nature, is big and encompassing and creative and destructive. It reminded me that fungi are, like the Universe, sublime.
...[a] rich and colorful portrait of fungi ...Mr. Sheldrake manages the immense subject of mycology by taking a literary approach. He looks at fungi through a variety of themes and analogies, and in the process is able to disclose so much more about these enigmatic organisms ... But there’s more packed into this lively stew of scientific fact, poetic observation and philosophical musing. Interwoven throughout are glimpses of the author ... Entangled Life is a gorgeous book of literary nature writing in the tradition of Mr. Macfarlane and John Fowles, ripe with insight and erudition. It may appeal most to readers who have a little mycology under their belts, but the language is eloquent and the analogies plentiful enough to secure the pleasure of someone less scientifically literate. Frothy beach reading? Maybe not. But food for the soul, definitely.
Sheldrake is in his early thirties, a biologist who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. But his evangelical zeal for the fungal world makes it plain that he’s drawn to the weirdness of it all ... His book recounts the requisite tales of champion truffle hunters, psychedelic adventurers, his own love of home-brewing beer ... What might we learn, Sheldrake asks, from the 'mutualism' and coöperation of a seemingly brainless organism? ... 'How best to think about shared mycorrhizal networks?' Sheldrake wonders. 'Are we dealing with a superorganism? A metropolis? A living Internet? Nursery school for trees? Socialism in the soil? Deregulated markets of late capitalism, with fungi jostling on the trading floor of a forest stock exchange? Or maybe it’s fungal feudalism, with mycorrhizal overlords presiding over the lives of their plant laborers for their own ultimate benefit.' ... None of these attempts to fit fungi into the logic of our world are entirely persuasive. Perhaps it’s the other way around, and we’re the ones who should try to fit into the fungus’s model ... or many, the pleasure of psilocybin is in giving oneself up to the weft of a connected world, and making peace with one’s smallness.
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.
...an exuberant introduction to the biology, ecology, climatology, and psychopharmacology of the earth’s 'metabolic wizards.' ... Sheldrake’s playful, wide-eyed register is occasionally trying, but it’s hard not to be astonished by the ways that fungi challenge the very idea of hard boundaries between beings ... Clarifying the relationship will require greater observation of underground processes than scientists now have the ability to conduct. Whatever its answer, the mystery is yet another demonstration that life, in Sheldrake’s words, is 'nested biomes all the way down.'
As a relative beginner, a post-doctoral researcher, [Sheldrake] has to depend on other people’s findings most of the time. That does not make them any less wondrous ... Sheldrake’s tribute to [biologist Lynn Margulis's] courage is a fitting climax to a book that beguilingly weaves together lived experience and scientific research.
With Entangled Life, Sheldrake proves himself to not only be an excellent inheritor of such a broad range of tutelage, but also a welcome translator of its remarkable implications. He has a talent for threading such broad perspectives into a highly lucid prose, and one gets the feeling that his own interest in the fungiverse is indivisible from his interest in the resonant properties of life itself, which, as he makes plainly clear ... Sheldrake manages to cover almost all the immense scientific and conceptual territories involved in his subject while keeping a light and often humorous touch, even when he is at his most profound. Entangled Life is, for instance, chock full of helpful and compelling analogies for the mycelial networks.
... fits in a growing family of work that expands our conception of the living world. Compared with writers who specialise in mammals, birds, bees, octopuses and even trees, Sheldrake faces an uphill struggle in developing a connection with his subject. His efforts to overcome fungi’s otherness are valiant but not always convincing ... He does, however, successfully present fungi as counterpoints ... Entangled Life is itself a little shapeless; the narrative sometimes doubles back on itself. Nonetheless, it is laced with intriguing details.
It is the mind-bogglingly interconnected nature of such networks that inspires the book’s title, Entangled Life , with its deliberate hint of mystery drawn from the idea of entanglement in quantum physics, where two fundamental particles can share a deep connection even when very far apart. It’s tempting, as Sheldrake points out, to see fungi as the biological model for a better world, where everything is enmeshed in a dance of mutual aid ... One question that recurs through this book is whether we should think of intelligence as something more broadly distributed in the world than we normally assume.
Entangled Life is both expertly explained and easy to read. In fact, this is a gorgeous, intelligent, utterly absorbing account of fungi ... In what can sometimes feel like an oversaturated market for nature writing, Sheldrake’s book stands apart, and does what all the best books do: it expands our world, and makes us look up from the page with renewed wonder.
What sets this book apart from previous
celebrations of the fungi, of which there
have been several, is that the author really
tries to imagine what it is like to be a fungus. His rich text evokes an understanding of what it would actually be like to be a filamentous microbe, forming interwoven networks that permeate, invade and feed upon the substrates that surround them. Sheldrake works hard to shake off the anthropomorphic viewpoint and see things from a microbial perspective ... Throughout the whole book, Sheldrake
describes complex fungal biology with
great clarity ... we are taken on a quite magical tour of all things fungal, with due respect given to the mind-altering qualities of psilocybin and alcohol ... accessible and fun[.]
... passionately and convincingly argued ... Sheldrake has the rare ability of translating his own and others’ highly technical findings into riveting prose. With its delightful illustrations, all drawn using ink derived from the shaggy ink cap mushroom, the book is a sensory as well as an intellectual pleasure ... Accomplished, riveting and surprising at every turn, Entangled Life explains the importance of fungi to our world. It is a fascinating tribute to organisms that, in comparison to plants and animals, remain almost unknown to science. Such is the complexity and diversity of fungi that none but a practising mycologist could have written such a work. We owe a great debt to Sheldrake for lifting his eyes from the microscope for long enough to enlighten us about the wonders of fungi.
As a love letter to this undervalued form of life, Sheldrake’s book is deeply engaging and constantly surprising ... Sheldrake is not immune to romanticism of his own. His account of the mind-altering properties of magic mushrooms has a touch of the shaman about it: all very well, but descriptions of other people’s hallucinogenic trips tend to be tiresome ... But these are quibbles about what is otherwise a balanced, well-informed and at times beautifully written book ... beneath the playfulness is a serious and disruptive question: how different would our societies look, Sheldrake asks, if we thought of fungi rather than animals and plants as 'typical' life forms?
The lives of fungi alone are fascinating, but the questions and wider implications that Sheldrake teases out from them are often truly astounding ... an engrossing, captivating journey into the usually hidden lives of fungi. It would be an impressive offering on the subject by a mycologist at the end of their career; and yet, impressively, Sheldrake is only 32 years old. This is a rigorous, comprehensive, perspective-altering debut by a young author who, if this book is any indication, has an exciting career in not only science but also literature ahead of him.
... an eye-opening exploration of this mysterious taxonomic kingdom ... It is hard not to get caught up in Sheldrake’s passion and enthusiasm for fungi...and no less so than when he considers how these organisms can help build the future ... a wonderful collection of fungal feats to inspire enthusiasts and future mycologists alike and a personal account of Sheldrake’s experiences with these miraculous organisms.
Entangled Life is a captivating trip into the weird and wonderful mycorrhizal world around us — and inside us. It's full of startling revelations, detailed science and just enough eccentric humour to make it digestible.
In this masterful work about mycology, biologist Sheldrake describes fungi as 'regenerators, recyclers, and networkers that stitch worlds together.' The introduction, 'What Is It Like to Be a Fungus?', brilliantly sets forth just how amazing and mostly out of sight fungi are ... Chapters address how fungi feed and grow, their partnership with plants, mycelial networks, lichens, mushrooms, symbiosis, and forest ecosystems ... A superb science book about a ubiquitous yet vastly underappreciated life form.
Biologist Sheldrake's first books is a fascinating account of how fungi have been an integral component of human existence ... heldrake makes biology both fun and accessible. Fans of Mary Roach and Bill Bryson will appreciate this enthusiastic treatment of the fungi around us ... From bread to booze to the very fiber of life, the world turns on fungi, and Sheldrake provides a top-notch portrait.
A deep-running mycological inquiry from fungal biologist Sheldrake ... The author engagingly instructs on the symbiotic relationship between fungi and the roots of seed plants.
... a revelatory look at fungi that proves their relevance to humans goes far beyond their uses in cooking ... In bringing all these diverse threads together, Sheldrake delivers a thoroughly enjoyable paean to a wholly different kingdom of life.
