Books › Entangled Life
Entangled Life
384 pages
A mind-expanding, earthy exploration that completely rewires how you perceive the natural world and your place within it.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like putting on a pair of magic glasses that suddenly reveals the invisible, pulsing networks beneath your feet. It is a deeply earthy, mind-expanding experience that moves at a steady, deliberate pace, allowing you to fully absorb the sheer wonder of the natural world. The prose is remarkably lyrical for a science book, blending rigorous research with poetic awe and a palpable enthusiasm for the bizarre and beautiful. You will find yourself looking at trees, soil, and even bread with a newfound reverence. It delights curious nature lovers, armchair philosophers, and anyone craving a radical shift in perspective, leaving you with a profound sense of interconnectedness and a lingering, joyful humility.
- Mood
- earthy
- mind-expanding
- wondrous
- grounded
- Tone
- curious
- lyrical
- enthusiastic
- awe-struck
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- interconnectedness of nature · hidden worlds · symbiosis · challenging human-centric views · the intelligence of the non-human
- The writing
- Lyrical and deeply sensory, blending rigorous scientific inquiry with poetic, philosophical musings.
- The arc
- Begins with grounded curiosity about the forest floor and expands into a profound, awe-inspiring realization of nature's vast, invisible interconnectedness.
- Who it's for
- Curious nature lovers and armchair philosophers eager to have their understanding of the world radically decentered and expanded.
Content notes
- discussions of psychedelics
- environmental degradation
About the book
"Living at the border between life and non-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, allowing plants to grow. Fungi not only help create soil, they send out networks of tubes that enmesh roots and link plants together in the 'Wood Wide Web.' Fungi also drive many long-standing human fascinations: from yeasts that cause bread to rise and orchestrate the fermentation of sugar into alcohol; to psychedelic fungi; to the mold that produces penicillin and revolutionized modern medicine. And we can partner with fungi to heal the damage we've done to the planet. Fungi are already being used to make sustainable building materials and wearable leather, but they can do so much more. Fungi can digest many stubborn and toxic pollutants from crude oil to human-made polyurethane plastics and the explosive TNT. They can grow food from renewable sources: edible mushrooms can be grown on anything from plant waste to cigarette butts. And some fungi's antiviral compounds might be able to ease the colony collapse of bees. Merlin Sheldrake's revelatory introduction to this world will show us how fungi, and our relationships with them, are more astonishing than we could have imagined. Bringing to light science's latest discoveries and ingeniously parsing the varieties and behaviors of the fungi themselves, he points us toward the fundamental questions about the nature of intelligence and identity this massively diverse, little understood kingdom provokes"--
Description from Open Library.
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