"Living at the border between life and non-life, fungi use diverse cocktails of potent enzymes and acids to disassemble some of the most stubborn substances on the planet, turning rock into soil and wood into compost, allowing plants to grow. Fungi not only help create soil, they send out networks of tubes that enmesh roots and link plants together in the "Wood Wide Web." Fungi also drive many long-standing human fascinations: from yeasts that cause...

A strange new pet pushes science geek Stink to the limit when Stink discovers the single-celled slime mold he fears could soon take over his pets, his room, and the world.

In It's a Fungus Among Us, you'll meet the wild group of organisms that can turn ants into zombies and eat trillions of pounds of feces every day. They also make cheese stretchy, add sour tastes to candy, and make bread rise! Historically, they've been blamed for the potato famine and the Salem witch trials, and in the future they may help save the environment because they can eat plastics in landfills and jet fuel from ocean crash sites. Read about...

"For readers of Entangled Life and The Hidden Life of Trees comes an illuminating account of the "invisible" fungi that share our world: from the air we breathe to the dust beneath our feet. The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi traces the intricate connections between fungi and all life on Earth to show how these remarkable microbes enrich our lives: from releasing the carbon in plants for the benefit of all organisms to transmitting information between trees,...

"An engaging and thrilling tour of the new frontiers in mycology-from ecology to fermentation to medicine-introducing the reader to the fascinating characters involved in the fungal Renaissance. Fungi are fundamental to life. As decomposers, they are critical to the formation and sustenance of soils and ecosystems. As endlessly innovative chemists, they devise and secrete enzymes that can break down a vast variety of materials, mitigate bacterial...

Taylor Lockwood, the world's foremost photographer of mushrooms, presents a program on mushroom identification.

"In order to understand the modern taxonomy of agarics and boleti, a thorough knowledge of microscopic features is an absolute requirement. This book is written with intent to provide the student of fleshy fungi with a source of information with which a thorough study of mushrooms can be achieved and species and genera of agarics and boleti can be identified." -from preface.

Mushrooms – we put them on our pizza and steaks and in our soups and salads, we marvel at their variety and are sometimes repelled by their grotesque beauty when encountering them in the bush. And yeah, some have even sampled their more exotic possibilities and asked the question: “Do mushrooms come from a far away planet?” Still, others have asked: “Can mushrooms save the planet?” The world of fungi and their integral relationship with...