Merlin Sheldrake. First edition trade paperback, 2021. Random House.

I think you have to be pretty off-kilter to be a mycologist (mushroom-studier). Like - why devote your life to mushrooms? They grow in dirt and/or rotting meat. For the most part they don't look as cool as plants, and don't do as much stuff as animals. They are neglected by human thought, so on the one hand it's easier to put your name on a new fungus species nobody's bothered to examine before, but on the other hand nobody will examine your species even afterward.

And why get into fungi? Well, there are a few reasons. One, they're agricultural pests. That's the most economically important aspect of them, but, that's boring; nobody's going to get excited about something just because it slightly reduces starvation. Two, some of them you can eat. Better. Three - they can get you high as fuck. Put you right up there singing countertenor in the choir of the machine elves. Now that's motivating. Mycologists are out of their gourds.

Point is, anyone who likes mushrooms is kind of a weirdo, and if you are such a weirdo, it's hard to find information on them. Good info that's not inscrutably technical or locked into the Eleusinian Mysteries is as rare as a truffle. Entangled Life is there.

Fungi are a big topic. I mean, they're an entire kingdom of life. A book on fungi is like a book on animals. How much detail can you really get when you have to cover all of giraffes, mantis shrimp, Greenland sharks, and tzetze flies? This book takes two of the right tacks here. One, try to give a general overview of how they fit into the reader's life and planet. Two, pick a couple sort of at random like I just did, and focus on those.

Quick pick of some surprising facts I learned from this book:

• Truffle hunters these days tend to use dogs, as pigs are so enthusiastic that they dig up and eat the truffles before they can be harvested.
• Fungal cells have traveling action potentials, like neurons (not as surprising as it might sound - plenty of tissue types do this)
• Some lichens can survive, if not grow, on the outside of spacecraft.
• The word "symbiosis" was originally coined for lichen.
• The earliest land plants to evolve did not have roots, and instead just got nutrients through myrcorrhizal fungi.
• Zombie ant fungi don't actually invade the brain, so maybe they just puppet the body directly while the ant is uh, as aware as an ant can be.
• There are fungi that eat animals (pictured)

Each chapter is essentially a completely new topic. There's a chapter on truffles and a chapter on electrophysiology - those aren't just different things, they're entirely different categories of thing. Despite that, nothing is really self contained, and the chapters bleed into each other. Truffles come up in the discussion of mycorrhizal networks, and so on. It's a good organization, both on the general principle that an overview of a really friggin complicated topic should make clear that it's really friggin complicated, and on a thematic level, because crossing boundaries is a lot of what fungi do.

Despite this, there are a few detectable running themes throughout to keep you interested. In particular Sheldrake returns repeatedly to the idea that fungi are kind of their own thing, conceptually - not something that can be reasonably described with analogies or especially anthropomorphizing. I already did so as I was reading, and just a few paragraphs he scolded me for it. It's true; I admit it; most fungi are totally unfamiliar with Marxian economics. I misled you by implying otherwise.

Now, for a scientist, this is a somewhat unusual idea to have, because a scientist's job is after all to understand things. Trick is, sometimes you have to do that without referring to the concepts you already know, and that gets difficult. (My personal first moment with this was learning how muscles work. They're very weird. The best analogy I can come up with is that muscle contraction is like rowing, but also like rock climbing.) There is a strong case made here that fungi are for the most part their own epistemological Thing, alien to our lives (unless you pay attention to the earth upon which you walk). Lichen, says Sheldrake, were originally conceptualized as slavery, later as friendship, still later as communities, but in fact - perhaps they are lichen.

What's really nice about this book is that it blends the hippie dippie enthusiasm of the mushroom lover with some Hard Science Facts. The author is, after all, a professional mycologist, and knows his shit, but without being too try. He'll talk about action potentials and experiments to characterize volatiles, and then segue into some talk of Haraway and Merleau-Ponty. Or just his childhood trips to visit family friend Terence McKenna. Enthusiasm alone would be rambling, unfocused, pointless to read, while science facts would be inscrutable, dull, and hard to read. Not many people can successfully blend both like this.

Oh, and there are illustrations, drawn by the author with ink from a fungus.

A word on the author. I'm pretty big on death of the author, but I want to make an exception. Dude's name is "Merlin". He has a brother named "Cosmo", who makes pretty good music about being a tardigrade. Well: turns out I heard of his dad before him, because Rupert Sheldrake is a pretty notorious pseudoscientist. I'm oversimplifying a bit - he was an actual biochemist at some point - but I've read enough of him to be unimpressed. It is interesting to see the younger Sheldrake show his real scientific rigor while not denying a sense for the mystic.