bNow abridged and filled with exquisite photographs, the iNew York Times ibestselling journey into the hidden lives of fungi--the great connectors of our world with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help address urgent environmental problems.b pIn his mind-bending gorgeous Margaret Atwood brilliant and entrancing The Guardian first book, iEntangled Life, i Merlin Sheldrake asked the reader to think like a fungus and introduced us to this mysterious but massively diverse kingdom of 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 so plants can grow. Fungi not only create the soil, they send out networks of tubes that enmesh the soil and the things growing within it in the Wood Wide Web. Fungi also drive many long-standing human fascinations yeasts that cause bread to rise and orchestrate the fermentation of sugar into alcohol the coveted perfume