them home—either way this book is still for you. All the recipes are pretty simple and easy to follow, and with few ingredients—but the end result looks amazing. (By the way: more kudos to the authors; I really really like cookbooks that show me what the finished dish is supposed to look like once it is prepared and assembled.) But I’m getting ahead of myself …


this book isn’t solely about cooking mushrooms! Wild Mushrooms begins with a good deal of really good, concise information about foraging for wild mushrooms and dispels myths that, to this day, I still see repeated on social media. Next the authors move through preservation basics: drying, freezing, pickling, etc. again, all great information and nicely concise. And all supported by plenty of beautiful, clear, and large (mostly) photographs. Te next 14 chapters cover the mushrooms, with each chapter focusing on a particular mushroom or mushroom group, e.g., oyster mushrooms, morels, chanterelles, candy caps, yellowfoot chanterelles, black trumpets, etc. Te final two chapters cover “mixed mushroom recipes,” and “medicinal mushrooms,” (mostly explaining tea and extract making). Te authors admit this is not a


comprehensive mushroom guidebook but does offer much information on where and how to harvest mushrooms, plus educates beginners (and even those with experience) on general cooking techniques and suggested preservation methods. No book has all mushrooms, but Wild Mushrooms amply covers pretty much all the most popular wild mushrooms, highlighting 14 of the authors’ favorite wild edible fungi which can be found over a wide geographic range. And actually, the recipes, tips, and stories aren’t solely their own—much of the information and recipes (and in fact what I like most about this book and what really sets it apart from an already crowded field of wild mushroom cookbooks) come from other fellow foragers. Collectively, 20 other foragers—some you know, some you may not have heard about (yet)— contributed their tips and stories about hunting, preparing, and cooking wild mushrooms. From the authors: “Tis book is as much a celebration of people as it is of mushrooms and cooking. As foragers, we each have that defining moment—the moment in which we all know that something special has


taken root. Like a burn morel waiting for the fiery embers that will allow it to flourish, foraging is a deeply buried need driven by age-old genetics. Te awakening can be sudden, but it is not to be ignored.” –Britt A. Bunyard


Journalism Award three times, among a host of other awards and fellowships. When he’s not writing about science he’s teaching it; Zimmer is an adjunct professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and he also teaches science writing there. Zimmer’s latest book, Life’s Edge: Te


Search for What it Means to Be Alive, might be my favorite. Tere is Zimmer’s usual style of telling about how the scientists made (or attempted to make) their discoveries (including some great stories of scientists that we should all be taught about in school but for whom many have been pretty much forgotten), and there is Zimmer’s curiosity, asking the same questions we all have. But this new book is quite different from previous books by the author in that he doesn’t really provide answers to those questions. At times this can be frustrating (we all want, no, expect answers to everything—and concisely laid out for us too!) but mostly it conveys just how amazing and wonderous, and at times exasperating, life and Biology (the study of life) is. To the non-biologist, it likely comes


Life’s Edge: Te Search for


What it Means to Be Alive Carl Zimmer 2021, Dutton (an imprint of Random House) ISBN-10: 0593182715; ISBN-13: 978-0593182710 Hardcover; 368 pages; Dimensions: 6.23 x 1.28 x 9.26 inches $28 USA, $35 Canada


C


arl Zimmer is one of my favorite science writers, he always finds


great ways to explain scientific concepts calling on stories from how discoveries were made, as well as some of the wrong turns scientists have made in the past on the road to our current understanding. (Scientific wrong turns and stumbles make for great reading, but are pedagogical as well, since we all—scientists included—learn from mistakes.) Zimmer is a prolific writer; he’s written more than a dozen books, as well as a regular writer for the Matter column of Te New York Times plus frequently contributing to Te Atlantic, National Geographic, Time, and Scientific American. He has won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science


as a surprise to find out that Biology has produced so many answers to the mysteries of life, but has never really explained what it is to be living. Well, at least there is no consensus among scientists on a definition of “life.” And this is the entire point of the book, and in my opinion, Zimmer inflates this lack of consensus (in reality there is a lot more agreement, at least among biologists, of what is living and non-living; more on this below). Scientists—and biologists are no exception—mostly are quite specialized (mycologists as an example, typically focus on one group of fungi or one aspect of their physiology, etc.). “What is life?” is an important


question to be able to answer. If astronomers and exobiologists encountered life outside of our planet (on Mars, for example), and if that life was very different from life here, how would we know it was living? How is it possible that we don’t really have a good definition of what it means to be alive? Biologists don’t much look at really big pictures or set out to answer big questions … less so, many or all the groups of organisms and their collective big picture, or collective big questions. Possibly the simplest (and maybe oldest) question posed to the field of Biology is


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