Unfortunately, some customers reported that this book is a little too lengthy for children to enjoy. Pros and Cons of The Mushroom Fan Club by Elise Gravel Pros

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 write about, but not very scientifically productive. Like plants, fungi can “see” color across the spectrum using receptors sensitive to blue light and red light—unlike plants, fungi also have opsins, the light-sensitive pigments present in the rods and cones of animal eyes." Carey, John (23 August 2020). "Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake, review". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Archived from the original on 30 August 2020 . Retrieved 2 September 2020. I had fun with this one — even though there were a couple of saggy spots, and I noticed a couple of errors. It is his first book. Overall, a contender for best popular science book of the year, and a welcome relief from a string of weak ones for me. Overall, 4.5 stars. a quoted passage from Galadriel in LOTR and the newfound knowledge that J.R.R. Tolkein was a consumer of mycelial researchEntangled Life is a well-chosen title. These two words perfectly describe this book. While it is about fungi, Sheldrake delivers a much broader message. One about relationships and the perspectives we adopt to see those relationships. These are not relationships between people but relationships between different forms of life: Fungi, microbes, plants and animals including humans. We see how the world we know depends on these relationships, and the critical role fungi play in these relationships.

Fungi can reconfigure their digestion to consume all sorts of toxic things people produce: cigarette butts, used diapers, radioactive particles, even plastic! Before roots – which describes how fungi were the early root networks of the first plants and even now have often complex relationships with plants – relationships we often view with a very plant-centric worldview. One fascinating comparison here draws a parallel between modern agriculture and its implicit assumption that the life of the soil and the role of fungi is somewhere between irrelevant and unhelpful and the attitude (until recently) of modern medicine to gut bacteria

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Some researchers compare mycelial networks to brains, others to computers. Both images are seductive: the first suggests fantastical beings, extending themselves in contemplative ingestion through forest and field; the second invites speculation that mycelium’s ability to sample and report on its surroundings might somehow be harnessed as a kind of ‘biocomputing’, capable of providing finely textured real-time reports on the health of the environment. Sheldrake cautions that neither metaphor truly gets close to the reality of mycelial lives, but he seems quite taken with them nonetheless. Likewise, Olsson dismisses the brain analogy, yet when observing that hyphal branching creates junctions that could act as ‘decision gates’ to integrate the streams of impulses from the foraging tips, he can’t resist wondering if mycelium might indeed act like ‘a “brain” that could learn and remember’.