Trade Paperback - NEW NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems. Fungi are neither plant nor animal, but they are vital to nearly all living systems. Merlin Sheldrake is one of a handful of scientists who specialize in the behavior of this massively diverse kingdom of life. His mind-bending introduction to this world will show us that humanity is just a small piece of a much larger puzzle.Perched 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 so plants can grow. Fungus not only creates the soil, it sends 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.In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake brings to light science's latest discoveries and ingeniously parses the varieties and behaviors of the fungi themselves, all while keeping us tuned to the fundamental questions fungi raise about the nature of intelligence and identity.
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