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THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS

ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING

A wonder-inducing dive into the unique kingdom of fungi.

In this debut memoir, an anthropologist recounts how mycology eased her out of mourning.

Long’s husband, Eiolf, collapsed suddenly at his office and died at age 54. A “paler, stupider, ashen” version of herself, the Norway-based author took a beginner’s course on mushrooms at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo. Finding voluptuous, golden chanterelles and flavor-bomb morels gave her a sense of joy—“for me there is no doubt that my discovery of the realm of fungi steadily nudged me out of the tunnel of grief”—and she trained to become a “mushroom inspector.” In Norway, certified mushroom inspectors, who must learn 150 species, review foragers’ hauls (for free!) to ensure no one inadvertently makes a deadly error, like mistaking a destroying angel for a tasty meadow mushroom. Long focuses on many aspects of various fungi—beauty, oddity, edibility, toxicity, hallucinogenic properties, potential as antidepressants—and less on mourning. The two subjects don’t always mesh well, though the author makes interesting observations about loss—e.g., “the map of my friends and acquaintances was redrawn after Eiolf’s death.” She brings an anthropologist’s perspective to the book, considering various cultures’ differing views—the clouded agaric smells “perfumed” to Norwegians and skunky to Americans, for example, and Norwegian mycologists really don’t like talking about magic mushrooms, which isn’t the case in the States—and she unearths endless fodder to liven up cocktail conversation: “Members of the fungi kingdom are more closely akin to those of the animal kingdom and, consequently, to Homo sapiens, than to the plant kingdom!” The book is more a collection of edifying tales and facts than smooth narrative, but it’s entertaining nonetheless. Learning about glow-in-the-dark jack-o’-lanterns, puffballs that “smoke” when you smash them, or toothy hedgehog mushrooms never gets old. Anyone with an interest in the natural world will delight in Long’s sharp-eyed descriptions (and Viskari's line drawings) of fungi and her therapeutic rambles through Norwegian woods.

A wonder-inducing dive into the unique kingdom of fungi.

Pub Date: July 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984801-03-6

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”

No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

Pub Date: March 2, 2004

ISBN: 0-609-61062-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003

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