A book. Tangled Life: How Mushrooms Shape Our World, Change Thinking, and Shape the Future. Merlin Sheldrake

BEST NON-FICTION PUBLIC BOOK 2021

In this book Dr. Merlin Sheldrake embarks on a fascinating adventure to explore the fantastical, weird and wonderful world of fungi: these organisms that support almost all life on Earth never cease to amaze. Neither a plant nor an animal, they are found all over the world, in the air and in our bodies. Fungi solve tasks without a brain, and can manipulate animal behavior with stunning precision. Giving us bread, alcoholic beverages, and life-saving medicine, mushrooms have shaped human history, and the psychedelic properties of mushrooms, which have amazed society since Antiquity, have alleviated many of the symptoms of mental illness. Fungi's ability to digest plastics, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is at the cutting edge of technology, and the discovery that they connect plants through underground networks, the 'forest internet', has changed the way we think about ecosystems. However, fungi spend most of their lives in secret, and more than ninety percent of their species are still undescribed.

A Tangled Life is an awareness-expanding journey into the secret kingdom of life. This book shows that without fungi we would not understand the planet we live on, and they are also essential to understanding how we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about mushrooms, the more impossible life seems to be without them.