good on fungi, loose on the wood wide web

good book, mildly oversold in the middle. the mycorrhizal chapters are careful about what has actually been demonstrated, and then the popular version of the wood wide web gets a longer run than the evidence supports. sheldrake does hedge, to be fair. the hedges are all in there, they're just quieter than the claims around them.

best chapter is lichen. two organisms that stop being two organisms, the taxonomic mess that follows, and the fact that we had the classification wrong for a century and a half. second best is the truffle one, mostly for the field work and the dogs.

the last chapter, where he makes cider from an apple tree and drinks it while writing about digestion, is a bit much, and i can see exactly why he did it.

notes and references run to roughly 60 pages, arranged by chapter rather than numbered, which i mildly resent, because you can't jump from a claim straight to its source without hunting. still there, still checkable. 8.