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A whirlwind journey through fungus frontiers that underscores how appreciating fungi is key to understanding our planet's power and fragility.
What can we learn from the lives of fungi? Splitting time between the northern and southern hemispheres, ecologist Alison Pouliot ensures that she experiences two autumns per year in the pursuit of fungi – from Australia's deserts to Iceland's glaciers to America's Cascade Mountains. In Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms, we journey alongside Pouliot, magnifiers in hand, as she travels the world.
With Pouliot as our guide, we smell fire-loving truffles that transform their scent after burning to lure mammals who eat them and, ultimately, spread their spores. We spot the eerie glow of the ghost fungus, a deceptive entity that looks like an edible oyster mushroom but will soon heave back out – along with everything else in your stomach – if you take a bite. And we crawl alongside vegetable caterpillars, which are neither vegetable nor caterpillar but a fungus that devours insects from the inside out.
Featuring stunning colour photographs of these mycological miracles, Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms shows that understanding fungi is fundamental for harmonizing with the natural world.
A Note on Fungal Terminology
1. Stirrings in the Subterrain
2. Life in the Mycosphere
3. Into the Australian Bush
4. No Such Thing as a Bad Fungus
5. Fungi, Fire, and Ice
6. Fungal Renegades
7. The Mycophagists
8. Conserving the Bizarre and the Beautiful
9. Women as Keepers of Fungal Lore
10. Restoring Fungi
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Images
Species Register
Glossary
Selected Sources
Index
Alison Pouliot is an ecologist and photographer with a passion for fungi.
"In this captivating study, ecologist Pouliot expounds on mushrooms she's encountered during her fieldwork [...] The result is an enjoyable tour of the fungal kingdom."
– Publisher's Weekly
"As Pouliot wryly describes her companions and their forays into forests, the fungi that inhabit them emerge as her protagonists [...] Attending also to the prominent women (including Beatrix Potter) who helped found mycology as a science and fungi's place in habitat conservation, Pouliot delivers a charming, informative presentation of a world beneath our feet."
– Booklist
"Conveying an impassioned message for conservation and awareness, Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms is a compelling, enlightening look at lowly but remarkable fungi that are often hidden in the shadows."
– Foreword Reviews
"Pouliot conveys the otherworldly charisma of mushrooms with love and skill."
– The Sydney Morning Herald
"Pouliot is a mycologist whose knowledge of fungi is extraordinarily vast and intricate."
– The Saturday Paper
"[Pouliot makes a] convincing case [...] Fungi are essential to the world as we know it."
– New York Review of Books
"I was entertained and enthralled reading this book and I promise I have never read a book from cover to cover on fungi before. I didn't think it was my jam, but [it turns out] it should be everyone's jam. Fungi is literally the glue that keeps us together."
– Readings
"Powerful stuff, which should be read by all those who continue to support the insane logging of our native forests."
– Jonathan Watts, author and environmental activist
"This subterranean journey introduces the quirks of behavior that allow fungi to spread through soils, support living plants, and recycle the debris of nature. Alison is an accomplished storyteller."
– Nicholas P. Money, Miami University
"[Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms] is a joy to read."
– Sophie Cunningham, author of City of Trees
"Sensual and scientific. Dazzling and boundary breaking. [Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms] will make you see the world anew."
– Long Litt Woon, author of The Way Through the Woods
"The world of fungi is our world even if we don't know it and can't see most of it-strange, dazzling, spooky, unpredictable, friendly, deadly, sly. And Alison is the perfect guide. She surprises and informs, delights and warns; makes you wish you could walk with her and her passionate companions. That's OK. In this book you do."
– Paul Kelly, songwriter
"An evocative, accessible and important book about one of the most vital, yet hugely ignored, kingdoms on our planet-fungi. After reading this you cannot help but see the world in a different light-and should approach mushrooms and truffles with new relish."
– Charles Massy, author of Call of the Reed Warbler
"Anyone who has joined Alison in a forest, anywhere in the world, will know her incredible ability to magnify those microscopic organisms that hold our natural world together, to connect every element of human life – physical, emotional or social – to the function of our natural landscapes. [Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms] is like a walk in the forest, pungent and complex, filled with curiosity and wonder, and leaving you with a sense that there is so much more to uncover."
– Millie Ross, ABCTV Gardening Australia
"The underground teaches us a different language – and Alison Pouliot is the perfect translator."
– Toby Kiers, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
"[Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms] takes storytelling about fungi to a captivating new level. A well-researched page turner."
– Anders Dahlberg, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
