Entangled Life  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures is a 2020 nonfiction book on mycology by English biologist Merlin Sheldrake. His first book, it was published by Random House on 12 May 2020.

Summary

The book looks at fungi from a number of angles, including decomposition, fermentation, nutrient distribution, psilocybin production, the evolutionary role fungi plays in plants, and the ways in which humans relate to the fungal kingdom.

It uses music and philosophy to illustrate its thesis, and introduces readers to a number of central strands of research on mycology. It is also a personal account of Sheldrake's experiences with fungi.

Sheldrake is an expert in mycorrhizal fungi, holds a PhD in tropical ecology from the University of Cambridge, and his research is primarily in the fields of fungal biology and the history of Amazonian ethnobotany. He is the son of Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist, and Jill Purce, an author and therapist, and the brother of musician Cosmo Sheldrake.

Reception

Jennifer Szalai of The New York Times called the book an "ebullient and ambitious exploration" of fungi, adding, "reading it left me not just moved but altered, eager to disseminate its message of what fungi can do." Eugenia Bone of The Wall Street Journal called it "a gorgeous book of literary nature writing in the tradition of [Robert] Macfarlane and John Fowles, ripe with insight and erudition."

Rachel Cooke of The Observer called it "an astonishing book that could alter our perceptions of fungi forever." Richard Kerridge, reviewing the book in The Guardian, wrote that "when we look closely [at fungi], we meet large, unsettling questions... [Sheldrake] carries us easily into these questions with ebullience and precision."

After completing Entangled Life, Sheldrake dampened a copy of the book, seeded it with spores, and ate the oyster mushrooms that grew from its pages. With another copy, he mashed up some of the pages to release their sugars, and fermented it into beer.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Entangled Life" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools