Picking a book from the Object Lessons series is like foraging (which is one of the themes of this book): you never know what you will find. It can be a memoir, a popular science book or a personal essay. ‘Mushroom’ falls mainly into the essay category, as it is widely eclectic and dives into many different topics. There is a bit of ecology, English literature and alchemy; the author brings stories from the past as well as looks into the future. She is mostly focused on the relationship between humans and fungi, rather than on biology. It can be sometimes a little bit meandering but brings many inspiring ideas as well.

The book is a part of an interesting series, Object Lessons, about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Thanks to the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

I have been hit and miss in my reactions to the OBJECT LESSONS series, though certainly leaning more toward the hit than the miss (the one prior to this one — Blue Jeans — for instance, was one of my favorites in the series). Unfortunately, this most recent title, Mushroom by Sara Rich fell into the miss category for me.

Every now and then one issue that crops up is a matter of expectations. To be honest, I expected a lot more about, well, mushrooms, I this text than I got. Or perhaps a better way to put it is I expected more concrete information about mushrooms. Instead, It’s more a wide-ranging mix of philosophy, religion, symbol, and metaphor. This isn’t a complaint — authors write their books, not mine — but it’s something readers should know going in. This isn’t, for example, a book like Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, a book that does get cited here (and is highly, highly recommended), and one which is more concrete and pragmatic in its exploration.

As well as more conversational in tone. You’re unlikely for instance to find sentence likes these in Sheldrake’s work:

The progenerative fundament common to the religious Medieval experience slowly drifted out of the theophilosophical and scientific mainstream … a renewed religious zealotry that retaliated against the animistic ontological flattening of many colonized peoples.
“There is a way that anthropomorphic metaphor can le to interspecies isomorphic revelation”
Again, this is not a complaint; it’s a book that requires more attention than some, but it’s hardly impenetrable. It’s more a question of personal preference; I assume you’ll know where you fall on the above sort of writing.

A bigger issue I had was the speculative nature of some of what Rich presents, with some claims that are unsupported beyond opinion for the most part. To be fair, Rich presents them as unsupported (or at least not fully so), with lines like “these tentative clinical confirmations” or “of course, all these medicinal foods . . . do far more . . . yet, despite some spurious base assumptions,” or “reportedly, village shamans may have shared” (where “reportedly” is carrying a lot of weight). And some of the points beyond the unsupported ones felt like more than a bit of a stretch.

Structurally, the work felt disjointed and a bit scattered, and this combined with the above issues made this a work I can’t recommend, though if this is your first title in this series, I do recommend giving others a try.

Mushroom is a philosophical foray into fungi symbolism with author Sara Rich, part of the Object Lessons series. She uses religion, tradition, culture, magic and mythology to describe various aspects and describes fungi with human traits. As a rabid mushroom forager and fungi identifier I am consumed with finding the correct habitat and growing conditions It is important to focus on weather and symbiotic relationships with certain trees. As the author says, mushrooms are nouns and verbs and this is evident on each foray. Each is beautiful and miraculous. My beliefs and thoughts differ often with the author's through the book but there is always something to learn from reading and reflection. Though fungi are incredible, I do not see them as having human traits. They are, however, symbolic and have been since for thousands of years.

The author writes essays within each season and describes fungi for each essay or lesson such as regeneration and renewal. She includes anecdotes. One which stands out in my mind is that if an insect likes a mushroom, humans will, too. But, of course, readers need to read contextually and carefully as that is far from the truth. One of my favourite expressions about foraging is "Every mushroom is edible. Some only once." But the focus is less on fungi than our relationships with it and reliance upon it.

Whilst the book is about mushrooms in an umbrella way, this book is not necessarily I would recommend to all foragers. At least not to those who simply love to be immersed in nature surrounded by wonders. It is for those who philosophize and dig deeper into other realms. Though not for me, it did cause me to reflect.

My sincere thank you to Bloomsbury Academic and NetGalley for the providing me with an early digital copy of this interesting book.

<i>“If agency is a marker of consciousness, we are forced to admit that not only are fungi conscious, but so too are plants, slime molds, bacteria, and viruses, who communicate sensations, decisions, and strategies, and who can solve problems altruistically. It might even be concluded that they maintain a level of dignity, in that they form their own laws to govern their actions.”</i>

This book is part of a book series called <i>Object Lessons</i>, which covers the hidden life of ordinary things and is published by Bloomsbury Academic. The author, Sara Rich, is an assistant professor of Coastal Carolina University’s HTC Honors Program. It is unclear if this author has any relevant experience or expertise in mycology, but it should be noted that pseudoscience is one of her teaching areas and speculative writing and speculative philosophy are among her research areas. Her bio’s publication credits include hauntography and fabulation genres, and her personal website expands on that. I lay this foundation not as criticism but to establish an understanding of this author’s oeuvre, as it will be useful.

With this background out of the way, what about this mini-monograph, <i>Mushroom</i>? Well, to say it’s about fungi would be accurate in a broad sense. Mostly, it is a work of either pseudoscience or speculative philosophy that revisits a well-trodden path: that religion is a sea anchor for scientific advancement. In this book, religion rises to the level of an interminable virus that has infected the hearts and minds of scientists and the common man alike for millennia. Capitalism runs a close second.

The author has many more things to say than what is examined here. She will provide a few personal stories and interesting tidbits about mushrooms (the Brazilian zombie ant fungus will forever change how you view marionettes!) then work her way into a hot topic—climate change—with unfortunate brevity. But for me, at least, this book offers only one fresh albeit speculative insight into the subject of fungi: that they are sentient, or should be seen as such.

I’m going to step out on a limb and take Rich seriously here, although I question this choice given her penchant for self‐conscious verbal artifice. At the very least, it will be a way to move this review forward.

To begin this metaforage, Rich argues that the Crusades— “make-Europa-great-again campaigns”—led to a renewed interest in classic texts, including Aristotle’s <i>De Anima</i>. “One such reverberation is the flawed understanding of the nature of our biodiverse planet, and by extension, the types of souls that form or inhabit the different kinds of bodies.” Aristotle’s view of the soul is biological in nature and places plants and fungi in the vegetative class, which Rich complains puts them just one rung above a tea kettle and dismisses them as “lowly nutritive souls, feeding and reproducing but fully incapable of either sensation or reason.”

She will build her case on this foundation, but I argue that we should go easy on Aristotle. <i>De Anima</i> was written in the fourth century. Modern technology such as microscopes and DNA sequencing that help identify taxonomically similar species were centuries away. These tools now play a significant role in the evolving system of biological classification. Indeed, fungi were granted their own kingdom decades ago. Why Rich focuses on Aristotle and later the medieval Great Chain of Being and does not comment on current science is unclear, except that it would collapse the argument that religion has created a reverberation of a flawed understanding of fungi’s place in the biological hierarchy.

Rich says that the organization of lifeforms, “from least to most ensouled,” trickled into Christian theology over the ages.” This began when <i>De Anima</i> got into the hands of Abrahamic religions who believed “each step, link, or rung is locked, confined to its design as the Almighty intended.” This has unfairly rendered fungi “insensate, insentient, sessile, and essentially expendable … opposite the pallid man at the pinnacle, who lords over the others while boasting of divine proximity.” Rich will make a reductive argument that “an overemphasis on bloodshed as sacrifice can only be the product of a longstanding ontological hierarchy that places animal life on a level above other kinds.”

In Rich’s view, religion is at the core of misperceptions and negative associations that have blinded people to fungi’s true nature and capacity. Mushrooms are “increasingly associated with the immorals [sic] of poverty, female sexuality, witchery, and otherworldly hallucinations… Perhaps it was fear and revulsion of the erotic explosions from the earth … [that] unjustly cast mushrooms so far down the hierarchy of existence, deep into heretical realms.”

Rich states that fungi have personalities and possess the capacity for learning, memory, cognition. No observations, research, or even antidotes are offered to support these claims. It is an unfortunate missed opportunity that neither the author nor editors considered that readers would be delighted to see examples of how a mushroom might exhibit behavior that can be viewed as greedy or grouchy or altruistic. Speculative philosophy, if that’s what this book is, does not bother with such things as evidence. It foregoes empiricism and the foundational scientific method. It relies on intuition and, oddly, insights into the nature of the Absolute or Divine.

This book series is intended for both academic and everyday readers, including book clubs. But I wonder if anyone beyond a niche segment of academia and those who seek fabulation or fantasy fiction will be interested in this work. There is a market for it, but the marketing literature is not helping put this book into the right hands, which is unfortunate for Rich. Assuming this is written in her preferred style, then she has done a fine job and this book should be steered to those who will appreciate it. I am not one of them.

Without the anchoring familiarity of having read past books in this series, there is no framework with which to judge how this book fits within it. It is filled with notional claims presented as fact and written with the zeal and passion of a disciple, but of what? Myco-theology, mushroom metaphysics. The hint as to what this means will not help us understand the relationship between religion and mushrooms, or their history, nature, abilities, and specialness, but it will help us understand Sara Rich—

<i>“For a myco-theologian, sacrifice is slitting the throat of excess and eviscerating toxic waste. Sacrifice is letting go of consumer impulses and the asinine optimism of capitalism. Sacrifice is doing the hard work yourself without expecting others, whether blue collar or indigo milk cap, to follow behind and clean up after your mess. No blood, no martyrs; no slaves, no masters.”</i>

I do hope this new theology will help her find a home in this universe. For now, she has the following to say:

<i>“I am something of a shameless misanthrope, a self-loathing human in the new geological era of our own making, the Misanthropocene. My pessimism needs a cure.”</i>

Many thanks to NetGalley for providing this ARC.