Join us for NPL's Just the Facts Book Group! This group selects and discusses nonfiction books. All are welcome.

PLEASE NOTE, THIS MONTH'S MEETING IS VIRTUAL.

This event will be held on Zoom for those attending virtually. Register online by clicking here or by calling 978-465-4428 x 242. A link will be emailed to participants automatically. If you do not receive a link, please email info@newburyportpl.org or call 978-465-4428 x242.

This month's pick is Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures, by Merlin Sheldrake.

Living at the border between life and non-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, allowing plants to grow.

Fungi not only help create soil, they send out networks of tubes that enmesh roots and link plants together in the "Wood Wide Web." Fungi also drive many long-standing human fascinations: from yeasts that cause bread to rise and orchestrate the fermentation of sugar into alcohol; to psychedelic fungi; to the mold that produces penicillin and revolutionized modern medicine.

Bringing to light science's latest discoveries and ingeniously parsing the varieties and behaviors of the fungi themselves, Sheldrake points us toward the fundamental questions about the nature of intelligence and identity this massively diverse, little understood kingdom provokes.

(Description from catalog record.)