Slayers, Saviors, Servants and Sex: An Exposé of Kingdom Fungi

This is an interestic book for mycophiles, or people just starting to get interested in mushrooms and other fungi. Some of the author's digressions into the dollar amounts of damage to industry blah blah blah get really dull. I did like learning the specific names of the organisms involved in fermentation and diseases. I used this as a source in my magazine The Urban Pantheist. I think the price listed (over seventy dollars when I wrote this) has got to be wrong. My copy cost under ten at another online book site.

As someone who delights in odd facts and has a curiosity about the underpinnings of our natural world, I found Moore's book to be the perfect blend of summary and specific detail, delivered in a relaxed and mischievious style. I've been on a quest for this type of book for a long time, both for personal pleasure and for research for my writing: one that went beyond the basic mushroom guide but that did not stray so far into the area of advanced scientific research that I could not follow it. Moore knows how to strike the right balance between entertainment and science in doling out the facts. I took great delight in chapter titles such as Toxins: Kill the Primates, Rule the World; Blights, Rusts, Bunts, and Mycoses; Decay and Degradation; and The Old Kingdom in Time and Space. Learning, for example, that rabbits can eat some mushrooms humans cannot is an innocuous enough fact--but learning that the Victorian cure for eating poison mushrooms consisted of downing a combination of raw rabbit stomachs and brains mixed with jam...well, that's simply the kind of detail that distinguishes an excellent book from a good book. Perhaps the best thing about the book is Moore's comfort level. He is so comfortable with this material that he revels in it--and this results in numerous corresponding delights for the reader. I have collected over two dozen books on fungi and this one is the best of the lot.