Author: Loree Burns

MYCELIUM RUNNING,
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World
By Paul Stamets
Ten Speed Press, 2005

Category: Nonfiction for Grown-ups

About a month ago, I picked a book that had been sitting on my desk for more than a year, MYCELIUM RUNNING, and finally started reading. Within days, the Deepwater Horizon exploded and oil from below the Earth’s crust began pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. Serendipitous, that, because while my mind has since grappled with the enormity of the disaster in the Gulf—massive amounts of oil and massive amounts of dispersants pouring and shooting into our oceans—I have been saved from complete despair by the calm and practiced thoughts of a mushroom man.

Paul Stamets is a mycologist, a mushroom scientist. He hunts them around the world, cultures them for fun and profit, and slowly, over the course of thirty years, has come to realize that mushrooms—more specifically, the network of cells that grow underground beneath them, called a mycelium—can help us save and restore the planet. How? By filtering contaminants from groundwater (a process called mycofiltration), restoring old growth forests (mycoforestry), cleaning up pollutants, including oil, from the environment (mycoremediation), and controlling insect pests (mycopesticides). In MYCELIUM RUNNING, Stamets explores all these topics, collectively called mycorestoration, and shares convincing experiments that indicate he just might be onto something.

I’ll admit to being unsettled by Stamets’ claim that mushrooms (and their mycelium) are sentient organisms … but I also have to admit to feelings of complete elation when a flush of mushrooms appeared in my front yard after a rainstorm last week (I posted a photo of these lovelies yesterday). I recommend MYCELIUM RUNNING to anyone up for an in-depth look at the world of mushrooms and environmental restoration. If you’d rather a brief overview of Stamets work and ideas, check out:

his TED lecture;
his thoughts on the Gulf oil spill;
and his Fungi Perfecti website.

I’d love to hear what you think. Or see pictures of the mushrooms in your backyard. Or know how YOU are dealing with news from the Gulf …

ALBERT EINSTEIN
By Kathleen Krull
Illustrated by Boris Kulikov
Viking, 2009

Category: Middle Grade Biography

It has been far too long since I blogged about a book love here. And while all the things that have been keeping me from doing so hold—my writing life is crazy busy and my family life is crazier busier—I had to make time today to shout about Kathleen Krull’s ALBERT EINSTEIN. It’s a must read, I think, for kids anyone with an interest in Mr. Albert Einstein.

We all know the man was a genius; his name has actually become synonymous with the term. And most people realize he devised the formula E=mc². But do you know what this formula means? or how Einstein came to it? or why it turned the world of physics on its head? Do you know what the photoelectric effect is? or how one might prove the existence of atoms? or that Albert Einstein explained both in the very same year he devised his Theory of Relativity?

Now, thanks to Kathleen Krull, there is a perfectly understandable and completely enjoyable overview of the man, his life … and his work. Everything the layperson needs to know about Einstein and his contribution to theoretical physics explained succinctly in 134 pages of a children’s biography. What’s not to love about that?

Breezy writing, historical details, and rock solid scientific content are the hallmarks of all the titles in Krull’s ‘Giants of Science’ series. I highly recommend LEONARDO DA VINCI, ISAAC NEWTON, MARIE CURIE, and SIGMUND FREUD, too.