A review by mwaltos
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

I finished this book as Seattle slides joyously into spring, and this beautiful treatise on the fungal world has been a wonderful complement to my rekindled connection to the outdoors. Moreover, this book has delighted me through its ability to engage with philosophical questions about identity, ego, and relationships by exploring these topics through a fungal perspective. The mycelium of fungi is especially metaphorically fecund because of its decentralized body and capacity for connection, and Sheldrake does a great job of explaining how these alien entities are—and have always been—so intertwined with human history.  Of course, I learned a lot about how fungi function, but I also learned so much about how fungi have shaped both the way we think about the natural world and the way we live in it. Sheldrake has a poetic style that brings his information laden prose to life and helps his reader see the hidden beauty of fungi that can be hard to understand with a certain level of expertise. 

My favorite sections of the book focused on how fungal hyphae communicate with other hyphae and the rest of the fungus, how mycelium connects plants together in a fungal network at their roots, and how fungi can help humans fix their ecological mistakes. It’s fascinating to think about how fungi can help us decompose harmful industrial waste, act as more eco-friendly building and textile material, and serve as a series of connective tubes that transport excess nutrients from one plant to another. All that being said, Entangled Lives has become my go-to non-fiction recommendation for biology enthusiasts, only rivaled by Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass.