A review by brookeonbooks
What a Mushroom Lives for: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make by Michael J. Hathaway

3.0

This book is intended for an academic audience, and was quite dry. The first half of the book is builds a foundation about the problems with a human centric world where animals, plants, and mushrooms are not viewed as having agency. The second half of the book examines the world building power of mushrooms, mainly matsutake mushrooms in creating wealth in China. There was lots of interesting information presented in the book, but at the end I was not convinced of the author’s central premise: that mushrooms have agency.