Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition: How Fungi Make Our Worlds

In his mind-bending "gorgeous" (Margaret Atwood) "brilliant [and] entrancing" (The Guardian) first book, Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake asked the reader to think like a fungus and introduced us to this mysterious but massively diverse kingdom of life. Fungi use diverse cocktails of potent enzymes and acids to disassemble some of the most stubborn substances on the planet, turning rock into soil and wood into compost so plants can grow. Fungi not only create the soil, they send out networks of tubes that enmesh the soil and the things growing within it in the "Wood Wide Web." Fungi also drive many long-standing human fascinations: yeasts that cause bread to rise and orchestrate the fermentation of sugar into alcohol; the coveted perfume agarwood, which derives from a fungal infection; psychedelic fungi; and the mold that produces penicillin and revolutionized medicine. Now, Sheldrake has pared down his thrilling narrative to the essentials and paired it with hundreds of full-color photos of flamboyant mushrooms, microscopic mycelium, and the dazzling places fungi thrive.