There are a lot of fungi in the world. Of the 75,000ish species of animals, plants, fungi, algae and a few protists that are recognised as occurring in the UK about one in five, 15,000 of them, are fungi. If we knew more about them then that proportion would probably rise rather than fall. And lots of them live on you or in you.
This is a very good popular science book about how fungi interact with our bodies from before the day we are actually born to after we are dead. It tackles a wide range of fungal interactions and explains what is going on in an understandable but accurate way. The lightness of touch means that the reader is carried along on a journey of exploration which stimulates the mind (and those fungi are in our brains too!).
The first 20 pages set the scene and are followed by individual chapters on fungi on our skin, in our lungs, brains and guts and by fungi in our diets, in medicines, as toxins, as stimulants to our dreams and as essential to the ecology of our planet (and maybe to other planets too).
There are more and more books which now remind us, or teach us, that fungi are everywhere even though they are very hard to spot. This is one of them and it is a very well-written account of the importance of fungi in our daily lives.
The cover? The illustrations in the text are sparse and simple, and I found that perfectly OK, but it does mean that the cover is the one shot that this book has at making fungi look good. I think it carries it off well. I’d give it 9/10.
Fungi and Human Life: the molds, mushrooms and medicines that fill our world by Nicholas P. Money is published by Princeton University Press.
You could buy this book from Bookshop.org and I have set up a booklist to make that easy through this link https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/MarkAvery Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase
[registration_form]