Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Sometimes we get a science book that reads like a novel, rolling us through the chapters. A book where we force ourselves to decelerate as we approach the end and are sad that there’s no more surprises ahead.  Entangled Life is a book like that. Published last May, it is written by Merlin Sheldrake, a scientist with impeccable pedigree for the study of the border of science and culture. The focus of the text is our fungal world, each chapter riveting us to one aspect. With Sheldrake we traverse the microrhizal networks, lifting our head to search for truffles in the moist soil or to watch the zombie ants’ hideous deaths controlled so effectively by codyceps. It is a book of awesome beauty and tragic brutality. Given that it, is not really a book about fungi at all, it is about life and all the earthly relationships. It is about how the understanding of symbiosis can show us the profound interdependence of life, a book that challenges us to reconsider our views of ourselves as identifiable automata; it lychenises us. This is a book which begins to enable the fungal world to speak for itself.