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A review by avalinda
Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World by Paul Stamets
3.0
Let me preface this by saying that I respect Paul Stamets's scientific background, and I too agree that mycelia/mushrooms are ecologically important and deserve more study. I picked up this book after hearing him speak on the Joe Rogan podcast, intrigued by what he had to say, and how well he said it. Sadly, his writing pales in comparison to his speeches, and after struggling through it I think I'll stick to his videos instead.
From a purely scientific perspective, I enjoyed what this book had to offer. From a literary perspective, however, I ran into some serious stylistic problems. This book, from my understanding, is scientific literature meant for the general public, to pique their interest in mycology and hopefully spur more dialogue about its importance. But such scientific literature has a threefold job - it has to be accessible, persuasive, and authoritative all at once. It can't bog down the reader with excess terminology, nor can it dumb things down too much or become overzealous; otherwise it loses credibility. I hate to say it, but Mycelium Running falls into the latter categories. The first 1/3 suffers from these common science-writing traps, while the rest read better though still with occasional flaws. Overall, this book could have been better written, edited, and organized. But to be fair I'll review it separately on what I did and didn't like.
Pros:
- Clear introduction to the major groups of fungi - saprophytic, endophytic, and parasitic, as well as brown rot vs white rot. I also liked that he went over general fungal structure and life cycles, which is important for understanding the rest of the book.
- Solid overview of fungi's ecological potential - from repairing deforestation to cleaning up toxic/radioactive waste to even fighting insect pests, this was probably my favorite part of the book. These are important and timely findings, and should be more popular than they currently are.
- Various fun facts about gourmet, medicinal and toxic mushrooms. These were enjoyable, along with the anecdotes and studies behind these findings. I won't be attempting truffle or chanterelle cultivation anytime soon, but I appreciated the warning that our regular button mushrooms should be sourced responsibly, since they can take up dangerous levels of heavy metals depending on their origin.
- Tips and tricks on how to harvest and grow your favorite mushrooms. These sections were comprehensive, plus realistic about the amount of time and effort it may take to produce results. I liked the details provided on different routes you could take (types of substrate, inoculation methods) even if I'm not a cultivator myself. I could tell the author had a lot of experience in this area, and I'm glad he had so much detailed advice to offer.
Cons:
- Repeated rhapsodizing, mostly in the first third of the book. I don't know about the rest of the audience, but when I'm reading anything marketed as scientific nonfiction, I expect science every step of the way. Phrases like "mushrooms are shamanic souls, spiritually tuned into their homelands," "mushrooms are forest guardians," "ancient mycological wisdom," "collective fungal consciousness," and, inexplicably, "chi power" take away from the overall message. I get it, the guy is passionate about (and may worship) mushrooms; I'm passionate about birds; someone else is passionate about cats. Maybe this is his attempt to connect with the general public. But language like the above is more suited to an everyday conversation than a scientific text. There isn't a study out there that can prove the "shamanic soul" or "chi power" of a mushroom, and at the end of the day I don't want to know how much you love the mushroom, just why it should matter to me and humanity - which is the point, right?
- First-person POV along with unsubstantiated beliefs. Similar to the above, this weakens the hypotheses and claims of the text. For instance, on page 23: "I especially feel that this is true upon entering a forest after a rainfall when, I believe, interlacing mycelial membranes awaken." But sir, what you feel and believe shouldn't matter in a scientific text, if you have access to studies that suggest as much. While this didn't occur too often, it was distracting enough that I ended up skimming the next few sentences that followed such an assertion.
- Product placement. As I got past the above poetic sequences and reached more technical details, every few pages/chapters I started seeing "for more information, see my book [insert title here]." I understand it's hard to summarize everything in a text meant for beginners. But why not just preface or end a technical section with a reference to other works, instead of ending sentences with them? It felt excessive after a point, and I started to wonder if I shouldn't just read his other book(s) instead of this one.
Finally, the Kindle edition is somehow listed as 356 pages on GR, whereas what I read was 600+, not including glossary, resources, and bibliography. I'm not sure why that discrepancy exists, but I think the first 200 pages or so could have been safely cut down to just hard facts on fungal structure/lifecycle, important studies, and interesting mushroom trivia. Around Chapter 11, the book became dense and sometimes repetitive, and the final section of the book was simply a very long list of common fungi; with no mushroom cultivation planned for the near future, I decided to just skim through for an overview and set the rest aside for reference when so inclined.
So, even though I like and admire Stamets as a person, I couldn't give this book more than 3 stars. It has an important scientific message along with sources to back it up, but the overall execution is flawed - I could have easily skipped straight to Chapter 7 without missing much. The hard-science parts of the book were its one saving grace; I'm not sure I'll be reading any more of Stamets's work, though.