This little book is big fun.--Michael Pollan

An illustrated mini-encyclopedia of fungal lore, from John Cage and Terence 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.

With charming drawings by artist and illustrator Amy Jean Porter, Fungipedia offers a treasure trove of scientific and cultural information. The world of mushrooms lies right at your door--be amazed!

• Features a cloth cover with an elaborate foil-stamped design

Outsider: My Boyhood with Thoreau is a memoir told in vignettes by the mycologist and author Lawrence Millman. Early on, Millman found in Thoreau a kindred spirit, far outside of the mainstream social, sporting, and educational interests he was expected to be cultivating. And like Thoreau, he would rather be out-of-doors -- where he could socialize with mushrooms, insects, or earthworms -- than stuck in any indoor locale.

A classic of northern exploration and adventure, LAST PLACES is Lawrence Millman's marvelously told account of his journey along the ancient Viking sea routes that extend from Norway to Newfoundland. Traveling through landscapes of transcendent desolation, Millman wandered by way of the Shetland Islands, the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador. His way was marked by surprising human encounters--with a convicted murderer in Reykjavik, an Inuit hermit in Greenland, an Icelandic guide who leads him to a place called Hell, and a Newfoundlander who warns him about the local variant of the Abominable Snowman. By turns earthy and lyrical, LAST PLACES is an ebullient celebration of the exotic North.

Are there mushrooms in Antarctica? What kinds of fungi grow on deer dung? What would happen to me if I ate Amanita muscaria? What have mushrooms got to do with Santa Claus? All these questions, and many others you would not have guessed to ask, are answered in Giant Polypores and Stoned Reindeer: Rambles in Kingdom Fungi.

Mycologist, author, traveler and raconteur, Lawrence Millman has brought together two dozen fascinating myco-tales of encounters with a wide range or organisms from extinct polypores, fungi that start fires and cure wounds, to intoxicated reindeer, wild mushroom collectors and Bornean head hunters.

Giant Polypores is a fungophilic ramble from the Antarctic to Honduras to Iceland, searching for new and rare taxons, unusual characters and strange encounters.

If you are enamored with such Latin binomials as Ganoderma applanatum, Gymnopilus spectabilis, Inonotus obliquus or Radulomyces copelandii you will love Giant Polypores and Stoned Reindeer. If terms such as resupinate fruiting body, cystidia, hymenium or glaborous make your heart beat just a bit faster, then, as mycologist emeritus, Elio Schaechter said, I dare you to put this book down once you open it.

En estos momentos, en la oscura humedad de un tronco hueco, crece un hongo. Parece inverosímil, pero ese hongo tiene el mismo ancestro que tú, y tu relación con él no solo es genética: también es gastronómica, espiritual, religiosa y comercial.

Desde el agárico blanco, que provoca la orina y baja la fiebre de la malaria, hasta los hongos bailarines de la película Fantasía de Disney, pasando por Alicia en el país de las maravillas y el hongo de Chernóbil que se alimenta de la radiación, este compendio con más de 180 entradas te transportará a un universo increíble.

No es una exageración: este año encontrarás muy pocos libros más interesantes que este. No importa en qué año leas esto.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

This little book is big fun.--Michael Pollan

An illustrated mini-encyclopedia of fungal lore, from John Cage and Terence 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.

With charming drawings by artist and illustrator Amy Jean Porter, Fungipedia offers a treasure trove of scientific and cultural information. The world of mushrooms lies right at your door--be amazed!

Unlike most books of poems nowadays, Goodbye, Ice by Lawrence Millman has a strong ecological bias. The book offers a window on the natural world of the Arctic and its tradition-bound indigenous people. Climate change, inevitably, raises its ugly head in many of the poems, but the book itself is a lament not just for the loss of ice, but for the loss of the Arctic itself.

Tent Dwellers--Okak, Labrador

Inside this licheny ring of stones that once held down a sealskin tent, I pitch my own domed aquamarine tent and then quickly crawl inside to escape an ice pellet shower, whereupon I see a couple of my predecessors squatting dim and hazy, Dorset People with cuprous, epicanthic faces, scrapers of skin, tellers of tales, diviners of the weather, who stare at this pallid specimen from a distant age in his nylon-lined apparel, astonished that he somehow survived and they did not.

Lawrence Millman is the author of eight other books (most recently An Evening among Headhunters) and hundreds of essays, short stories, and poems published in hundreds of magazines, as well as the editor of several anthologies.