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Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
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About This Book
There is a lifeform so strange and wondrous that it forces us to rethink how life works…Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation. In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of 'intelligence', and can manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the 'Wood Wide Web', is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented. Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into this hidden kingdom of life, and shows that fungi are key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.
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Reviews
"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."
"It reminded me that fungi are, like the Universe, sublime."
"But there's more packed into this lively stew of scientific fact, poetic observation and philosophical musing."
"Sheldrake's book is full of striking examples like these, prying open our cramped perspectives."
"A 'door-opener' book is one with a specialist subject in which it finds pathways leading everywhere."
"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."
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