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From Eugenia Bone, the critically acclaimed author of Mycophilia, comes an approachable, highly personal look at our complex relationship with the microbial world. While researching her book about mushrooms, Eugenia Bone became fascinated with microbes—those life forms that are too small to see without a microscope. Specifically, she wanted to understand the microbes that lived inside other organisms like plants and people. But as she began reading books, scholarly articles, blogs, and even attending an online course in an attempt to grasp the microbiology, she quickly realized she couldn’t do it alone. That’s why she enrolled at Columbia University to study Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology. Her stories about being a middle-aged mom embedded in undergrad college life are spot-on and hilarious. But more profoundly, when Bone went back to school she learned that biology is a vast conspiracy of microbes. Microbes invented living and as a result they are part of every aspect of every living thing. This popular science book takes the layman on a broad survey of the role of microbes in nature and illustrates their importance to the existence of everything: atmosphere, soil, plants, and us.
From Eugenia Bone, the critically acclaimed author of Mycophilia, comes an approachable, highly personal look at our complex relationship with the microbial world. While researching her book about mushrooms, Eugenia Bone became fascinated with microbes—those life forms that are too small to see without a microscope. Specifically, she wanted to understand the microbes that lived inside other organisms like plants and people. But as she began reading books, scholarly articles, blogs, and even attending an online course in an attempt to grasp the microbiology, she quickly realized she couldn’t do it alone. That’s why she enrolled at Columbia University to study Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology. Her stories about being a middle-aged mom embedded in undergrad college life are spot-on and hilarious. But more profoundly, when Bone went back to school she learned that biology is a vast conspiracy of microbes. Microbes invented living and as a result they are part of every aspect of every living thing. This popular science book takes the layman on a broad survey of the role of microbes in nature and illustrates their importance to the existence of everything: atmosphere, soil, plants, and us.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
Introduction
When I was working on my book about mushrooms, Mycophilia, I asked the mycologist Tom Volk whether bacteria lived inside fungi the way they live in us.
“If you ask me,” he said, “I think there are probably bacteria in everything.” That quote lingered in my mind for years. If bacteria (and, I would later learn, other microscopic organisms) live in everything, did that mean all living things are connected by microbes?
I started looking for the answer in books about microbiology. That’s where I hit my first snag. I had no microbiology background. Actually, I had almost no biology background at all. I was an English major in college not only because I loved to read and write but also because I was convinced I was hopeless at science and math. So the books I read may have contained the answer, but if they did, I couldn’t see it.
That’s why I went back to college, at 55 years old, to study biology. Going back to school turned out to be a kind of unraveling of my ego, where I had to deal with being bad at something all the time. It wasn’t fun, but it turned out to be necessary, because humility is the entry point for understanding nature. One of the many things I learned in college was the deeper you look, the more complex life is.
I also learned that learning is not something you age out of. In fact, it can change everything, no matter how old you are. I went to college to study biology in order to expand my perception of life. And it did, but not in the way I expected. I found out that life itself is a vast conspiracy of microbes.
Microbiology, the study of organisms too small to see with the naked eye, is really difficult to comprehend at 55 or any other age. You can’t use your senses to perceive these tiny life-forms. Unless you have a microscope, you have no primary observation of them, only secondary sensing. You can see the burp of methane bubbles in Los Angeles’s greasy La Brea Tar Pits, but you can’t see the archaea that are producing the gas. It’s challenging to describe microscopic organisms with words for the same reason. Throughout the process of writing this book, I kept losing track of my voice, the truth-speak that comes directly from the writer’s personality. And it occurred to me my problems were founded in the very limited number of adjectives I could use. I mean, the descriptive tools of my trade—sight, sound, smell, and touch—don’t really apply to a bacterium. It seemed like my writerly challenges were synonymous with the challenges I faced in understanding the biology of the microscopic world. My worldview, which includes my way of communicating, is locked into a scale relative to my experience. But the microscopic world operates on a very different scale.
That’s a problem, because we can understand nature and ourselves in a deeper way through the lens of a microscope. New discoveries about the impacts of bacteria on our lives occur every day, and while the headlines grab some of us, many of these breakthroughs seem beyond the capacity of most people to understand. But microbiology is where it is happening. This is the age of bacteria, said the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.”
Microbiology is like a foreign country. It is very difficult to get around without a basic vocabulary. That’s what the biology course I took at Columbia University (my alma mater: I graduated from Barnard College during the Reagan administration) gave me. I acquired...
About the Author-
Eugenia Bone is a nationally recognized journalist, food writer, and former president of the New York Mycological Society. She is the author of Mycophilia, The Kitchen Ecosystem, At Mesa’s Edge, Italian Family Dining, and Well Preserved. Her books have been nominated for a variety of awards, including a James Beard Award, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Saveur, Food & Wine, and Gourmet, among others.
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