The Mushroom at the End of the World cover art

The Mushroom at the End of the World

On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

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The Mushroom at the End of the World

By: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
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About this listen

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world - and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?

A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.

©2015 Princeton University Press (P)2017 Tantor Anthropology Economics Environmental Economics

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All stars
Most relevant  
great in every aspect- very enlightening and wholesome. interspecies survival in capitalist precarity explored though layering of chapters and different aspects amd points of view

phenomenal

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A fascinating study. Very thought provoking. A little irritated by the reader’s voice but the content itself will interest mushroom lovers and lay people alike.

The comprehensive study of one type of mushroom

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A compelling multi-species account of themes around mushroom picking, with a strong development of themes of procerity and personhood under neoliberalism and the new forms of scholarly formulations endorses by people like Haraway. Totally banging book.

The Mushroom at the End of the World

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A great 'read" and extremely well researched. Full of complex and brilliant ideas. I'm ready to start it all over again.

A beautiful, rich and fascinating book.

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Using the subject of mushrooms this book and author encouraged us to look at capitalism in a different, more manageable way. I welcome this challenge in a time of doom and gloom on the one hand and avoidance on the other.

Terrific

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The narrator's inability to pronounce the word 'fungi' is a bit of an issue for a book about mushrooms.

I'm torn between two and three stars for this, and decided to be generous.

This is a strange, meandering, repetitive book that - with a good (and brutal) editor could have been a pretty decent hybrid exploration of the east and south east Asian experience of immigration to the US and the role of fungi in forest ecosystems and the human economy.

But it doesn't even slightly deliver on its grand promise of presenting an alternative take on (or to) capitalism, and the potential for a post-capitalist, post-apocalyptic world. There are snippets and hints of this throughout, but whatever the argument is is so scattered amongst the (diverting, if all very similar after a while) accounts of encounters with mushroom pickers.

TBH if it weren't for the hefty emphasis on a part of Japanese culture I wasn't previously aware of, I probably would have given up a quarter of the way through.

Repetitive, rambling, but interesting

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I gave up on this book. I really wanted to like it, and there are some interesting facts. But the author has interspersed these with so much unsubstantiated opinion and chatter that by the time she is talking about something cool again I’ve drifted off. Shame, because the idea interested me

Too much waffle

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Once I start a book I will finish it. Unfortunately, because some books are better left unfinished. This book does not offer interesting or useful information. It rather takes you on a long, neverending and boring exploration of all things around Matsutake mushrooms. And it feels like it covers everything but the mushroom itself. There is some information on the mushroom. Something like 2% of the book can be credited as interesting info. The rest is pointless conjectures.

What a waste of my time

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