Fungipedia, Lawrence Millman
Fungipedia, Lawrence Millman
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Fungipedia
A Brief Compendium of Mushroom Lore

Author: Lawrence Millman

Narrator: Al Kessel

Unabridged: 5 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/29/2019


Synopsis

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 readers 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.

About Lawrence Millman

Lawrence Millman is a mycologist and author of numerous books, including Our Like Will Not Be There Again, Last Places, Fascinating Fungi of New England, and At the End of the World. He has done mycological work in places as diverse as Greenland, Honduras, Iceland, Panama, the Canadian Arctic, Bermuda, and Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has documented 321 different species.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bradley on June 14, 2021

Know what kind of mushroom you're picking up here. It's a brief, breezy overview of ALL mushrooms! Best of all, even if all the mushrooms in the book aren't edible, the book itself is quite tasty. It might give you a few hallucinations, however, of their sex lives (some have 26 ways to procreate!) or......more

Goodreads review by Rio on December 30, 2024

"Given the similarities between fungi and our species, it’s not surprising that we relate to fungi differently from the way we relate to plants. They inspire in us phobic reactions, total delight, anthropomorphic thoughts (in Russian, an old person is called a starry grib— a dried-up mushroom), fict......more

Goodreads review by Emiline on December 27, 2024

this book was given to me as a gift when my interest in mushrooms and fungi first sparked more into an academic hobby of sorts. i enjoyed every moment of this book, and am anxious to admit that my enjoyment of it forced my reading to span over a decent couple of months. once i got over this need to......more

Goodreads review by Lina on January 28, 2021

It is indeed interesting, comprehensive enough, and funny where it's reasonable. However, the structure of the encyclopedia does not work. It should be like a manual of fungi, not dictionary of select terms. It's difficult to digest information on a complicated scientific subject without a structure......more