Mushrooming: An Illustrated Guide to the Fantastic, Delicious, Deadly and Strange World of Fungi,
by Diane Borsato
It seems everyone is embracing their inner mycophile these days, and though I retain a contrarian teenager’s aversion to trends, I’m totally on board with the mushroom craze. Because mushrooms are magical. And marvelous sautéed with garlic. And wonderfully, fascinatingly bizarre. There are mushrooms that so resemble birds they’re routinely shot by hoodwinked hunters, ghostly tooth-like mushrooms that drip “blood,” mushrooms that glow in the dark—all of which, along with well over a hundred others, can be found in Toronto-based artist Diane Borsato’s new mycological masterpiece. More than your standard field guide, Mushrooming introduces readers to a magnificent array of fungi, offering not only the practical “can I eat this without dying?” basics of each species but also musings on what these spore-bearing beings can teach us about “sensory literacy,” biodiversity, mortality and regeneration, artistic inspiration, and the interconnectedness of the living world. With Borsato’s rich, lyrical descriptions and vibrant gouache illustrations by Kelsey Oseid, this book is sure to turn you on to the wonders and weirdnesses of our fungal friends.
For fans of chanterelles, reishi, lion’s mane, chaga, maitake…
Your Body is a Revolution: Healing Our Relationships with Our Bodies, Each Other, and the Earth,
by Tara Teng
Western culture has spent centuries, if not millennia, stiffening into a decidedly antagonistic stance towards physicality, an antagonism we’ve absorbed and experience today as a profound collective disconnect from the bodies that we are. The pain of this disconnect pangs particularly sharp for women, who have come to symbolize the despised body more so than men, but its harms touch us all, as we are taught to distrust, dismiss, devalue, and demonize our own flesh and blood; as we strive to mold ourselves after impossible media-imposed ideals and sense our bodies as enemies when we fail to meet them. And who better to understand this age-old culturally induced disconnect, and to develop the insights to undo it, than a former beauty queen? Named Miss World Canada in 2012, Tara Teng’s time in the public spotlight as a “perfect specimen” instilled in her an intimate familiarity with the pressures, shames, and alienation associated with being a human body. Now, having doffed her tiara, she brings this perspective to her work as an embodiment coach and women’s rights activist, and to her debut book, Your Body is a Revolution. Teng sets out to support readers in overcoming cultural and personal trauma, in order to shift into more loving relationships with their own bodies, and the bodies of others and the earth in turn. In Your Body is a Revolution, she examines the social systems that have made us exiles from our own bodies and invites us “to reclaim what has been has been stolen from us,” to finally come home.
For fans of The Body Keeps the Score and everybody else made of bones, blood, flesh, guts, etc.
