What a Mushroom Lives For

Matsutake and the Worlds They Make

By: Michael J. Hathaway, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - foreword

Narrated by: Christopher Grove

What a Mushroom Lives For pushes today's mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal-centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior. But, as Michael Hathaway shows, the world-making capacities of mushrooms radically challenge this orthodoxy by revealing the lively dynamism of all forms of life.

The book tells the fascinating story of one particularly prized species, the matsutake, and the astonishing ways it is silently yet powerfully shaping worlds, from the Tibetan plateau to the mushrooms' final destination in Japan. Many Tibetan and Yi people have dedicated their lives to picking and selling this mushroom—a delicacy that drives a multibillion-dollar global trade network and that still grows only in the wild, despite scientists' intensive efforts to cultivate it in urban labs. But this is far from a simple story of humans exploiting a passive, edible commodity. Rather, the book reveals the complex, symbiotic ways that mushrooms, plants, humans, and other animals interact. It explores how the world looks to the mushrooms.

A surprise-filled journey into science and human culture, this exciting and provocative book shows how fungi shape our planet and our lives in strange, diverse, and often unimaginable ways.

©2022 Princeton University Press (P)2022 Tantor

A wonderful book about world-making beyond humans

Much like Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s beautiful book, this continues the journey and investigation of Matsutake and parallels with human existence. An enriching read.

Part ecological treatise, part ethnography

Hathaway’s book that combines a rethinking of the role of fungi in reshaping habitats and environments (and really as historical agents in their own right) with an ethnographic study of communities that have popped up to harvest and ship a specific species of mushroom (matsutake) in Tibet and Yunnan province in China.

My only complaint is that the parts of the book felt somewhat disconnected from each other. But this was nevertheless a compelling, accessible audiobook. Very readable. I alternated between listening at 1.5 and 1.7 speed and could readily follow the argument.