Fungipedia

A Brief Compendium of Mushroom Lore

De: Lawrence Millman

Narrado por: Al Kessel

An illustrated mini-encyclopedia of fungal lore, from John Cage and Terrence McKenna to mushroom sex and fairy rings.

Fungipedia presents a delightful A-Z treasury of mushroom lore. With more than 180 entries - on topics as varied as Alice in Wonderland, chestnut blight, medicinal mushrooms, poisonings, Santa Claus, and waxy caps - this collection will transport both general listeners and specialists into the remarkable universe of fungi.

Combining ecological, ethnographic, historical, and contemporary knowledge, author and mycologist Lawrence Millman discusses how mushrooms are much more closely related to humans than to plants, how they engage in sex, how insects farm them, and how certain species happily dine on leftover radiation, cockroach antennae, and dung. He explores the lives of individuals like African-American scientist George Washington Carver, who specialized in crop diseases caused by fungi; Beatrix Potter, creator of Peter Rabbit, who was prevented from becoming a professional mycologist because she was a woman; and Gordon Wasson, a J. P. Morgan vice-president who almost single-handedly introduced the world to magic mushrooms. Millman considers why fungi are among the most significant organisms on our planet and how they are currently being affected by destructive human behavior, including climate change.

©2019 Princeton University Press (P)2019 Tantor

Interesting!

Very entertaining and informative👍🏻 I would definitely recommend this book to anyone into fungi or just nature in general.

Performance makes a decent book mediocre

It is hard to tell if large portions of this book were condescending because of how it was written or the delivery of the reader. The book also contains many outdated, racially superior, or outright racists claims. Portions of the text will mention a practice that is used in a traditional medicine tradition as the practice of an entire nation. Some slurs are used. And sometimes claims are made of medicinal uses that have not been rigorously tested by medicine. While I do not doubt the author’s knowledge within his own field, there are claims about others that sometimes make me, having studied some of the fields in question, anxious to hear proclaimed as fact.