Entangled Life By Merlin Sheldrake Reviewed by Alexis Williams, Sept 2020
Merlin Sheldrake says dreamy things like: “If I think about about mycelium for more than a minute, my mind starts to stretch.” There wasn’t time for me to present his book Entangled Life to last month’s Biophilia Book Club, which is just as well, because I wouldn’t have been able to do it without licking the cover. I love this book. It’s my new all time fave.
I just read Fungi Magazine’s bad review of this book. Their main complaint was the lack of Latin binomials. Did they ever miss the point! The distinct separation between species, as celebrated by taxonomy, is a very human construct. Sheldrake is suggesting that we are all symbiotic, composite organisms with blurred boundaries between our selves. A point he presented quite clearly. While reading this book I would see an image of a concept and for a moment I would feel like I had had the idea myself. The next page he would render the image a different way, and then again until he spelled it out plainly. Not only was he dexterous in presenting an idea, he did it with tension and style.
The Biophilium 