Crying in H Mart (A Memoir)

by Michelle Zauner (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021)

Michelle Zauner was born in Korea to an American father and a Korean mother and raised in the United States, in the Pacific Northwest. She is the lead singer in the band Japanese Breakfast; her husband Peter Bradley is the guitarist in the band. The book is a memoir about Zauner’s mother’s cancer and death, as well as being about Korean food–who knew there were so many kinds of Korean food? Zauner tends to mention them without explaining them; occasionally she describes how to make them. This vegetarian found some of the foods off-putting, but that’s life.

Zauner examines her emotions during the roller-coaster ride of her mother’s illness and death, avoiding nothing: her difficult relationship with her father, her inability to believe her mother could actually die so young (Zauner was only 25 when she lost her mother), her pursuit of the man who would become her husband, her relationships with her Korean relatives and also her mother’s Korean friends who came to help Zauner and her father care for the dying woman. She struggles to find and keep the Korean part of her that comes from her mother.

The book has been on the Washington Post‘s bestseller list for months.

Michelle Zauner is interviewed about Crying in H Mart at https://youtu.be/TW0m4IwHnCY

Japanese Breakfast performs songs from their album Soft Sounds from Another Planet at https://youtu.be/xFKH42R8wak.

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

by Jamie Raskin (HarperCollins 2022)

I live in Maryland’s Sixth Congressional District. I used to live in the Eighth District, but redistricting resulted in a newly configured district map, and that is why Jamie Raskin does not represent me in Congress <sigh>. (He does represent my Congressman, who actually resides in the Eighth District, but that’s another story.) But I love and admire Jamie: when jaded people complain that “all politicians are corrupt,” I tell them about Jamie’s integrity and honesty and dedication to our country, our state, our county, and democracy in general. He’s the real deal. So when I learned that Jamie’s only son, Tommy, had taken his own life on December 31, 2020, I was as shocked and sad as any of his constituents. Then, just six days later, Donald Trump’s mob laid siege to our Capitol in a vain attempt to steal the election from Joe Biden. Jamie was tapped to be the Lead Manager of Trump’s second impeachment, this time for incitement of insurrection, and we all watched him and his team of managers build a superb case to convict the lawless president only to be undermined by McConnell and the other Republican hypocrites in the Senate.

This book is Jamie’s letter to those who wrote to him following Tommy’s death; he received so many condolences that it was impossible to answer them all (though he tried). He writes about Tommy and his family (wife, daughters, siblings, nieces, nephews…), Tommy’s struggle with depression, his amazing intelligence and kindness, how funny he was and how he could make anyone laugh. He writes about his last evening with Tommy, the two of them alone in their Takoma Park home, and how he found Tommy’s body when he went to wake him up the following morning (could anyone think of a worse horror for a parent?). Then how when he went to work to participate in the official electoral vote count on January 6, he found himself and his fellow legislators under attack by Confederate-flag-wielding rioters–just how close those rioters came to being able to physically attack Senators, Representatives, and their staff, as well as the Vice President, there in his official capacity to oversee the counting of the votes (but under intense pressure from Trump to break the law and send the slates back to certain swing states so that Trump could overthrow the election results–and with them, the government). Jamie’s younger daughter Tabitha was also in the Capitol that day with her brother-in-law Hank; they were barricaded inside an office, cowering under a desk as the rioters tried to break down the door. Jamie, still consumed by grief, felt no fear except for Tabitha and Hank.

When the House voted to impeach Trump again for inciting the riot, Speaker Nancy Pelosi “threw him a lifeline” by asking him to manage the impeachment in the Senate. Jamie went to work, feeling that Tommy, with his innate sense of fairness and justice, was with him. Most of the book describes how the team of managers built their case and took it to the Senate, where a majority were convinced to vote for conviction–but not the 2/3 required to convict. As I write, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has just finished airing the first five of its public hearings. Jamie Raskin is on this committee too, but he has not yet had his day as the main questioner. I look forward to that hearing.

At the recent Gaithersburg Book Festival, Takoma Park mayor Kate Stewart advised everyone to buy this book so that the truth of what happened on January 6th will not be lost. She said, “Read the book; keep the book; pass the book down to your children and grandchildren, so no matter what happens in the next couple of weeks or months or years, they have a record of this time.” Good suggestion.

You can watch Mayor Stewart’s introduction and Jamie Raskin’s talk here. And be sure to read this book. It should be required reading for all of us.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

by Merlin Sheldrake (Random House 2020; Ebook)

In this love letter to the fungi of the world (and out of this world), Merlin Sheldrake regales his readers with his stories of fungi and how they make life possible for both plants and animals.

Prologue: Sheldrake describes field work in the jungle, hunting fungi. It sounds pretty off-putting for a city girl like me.

Introduction: What Is It Like To Be a Fungus? – “Fungi . . . are inside you and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on. . . . As you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens. . . . They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the compoition of the Earth’s atmosphere.” These and lots more amazing facts about fungi. Who would have thought?

Chapter 1: A Lure – All about truffles. A truffle’s “job” is to be eaten, which will scatter its spores. Sheldrake explains what constitutes smells and what makes them smell as they do. In fungi, the whole surface of the fungus is like a human nose. It all reacts to chemicals in the form of odors. Did you know there is a breed of dog (the Lagotto Romagnolo) bred especially to hunt truffles? Sheldrake describes truffle-hunting in Italy.

Chapter 2: Living Labyrinths – All about mycelium. How fungi exist, including how they move (with their “hyphal tips” protruding in this direction or that). What mycelium is (“ecological connective tissue”; “polyphony in bodily form”; “a kind of collective behavior”; what happens when fungal hyphae commingle”) and where it is (pretty much everywhere). It’s similar to a swarm (of birds, bees, termites, sardines)–a kind of collective behavior. Famous experiments with slime molds that can replicate the rail network around Tokyo. They do very well in maze experiments, which we use to measure intelligence in animals like rats. Mycelium is how fungi nourish themselves: “Some organisms–such as plants that photosynthesize–make their own food. Some organisms–like most animals–find food in the world and put it inside their bodies. . . . Fungi . . . digest the world where it is and then absorb it into their bodies. . . . Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.” Mushrooms are the “fruiting bodies” of fungi–a fungal version of flowers.

Chapter 3: The Intimacy of Strangers – This chapter concerns lichens, which are part fungi and part algae. Lichens are “extremophiles” which can live on the edge of what can sustain life: in space (on the outside of a space ship), inside volcanoes, in the deepest ocean trenches. That greenish stuff on my iron railing is pretty amazing! It used to be thought that either the fungi or the algae were exploiting the other partners, but now it seems clear that both benefit from the partnership. The fungi are mycobionts; they acquire nutrients and protect the organism. The algae are photobionts; they make the food that sustains it. Together, they can survive where neither could survive by itself. The word symbiosis was coined by German scientist Albert Frank to describe lichens. (Frank was also the first to suggest that fungi might be helping plants to get nutrients from soil.)

Chapter 4: Mycelial Minds – Here Sheldrake focuses on “magic mushrooms”–the fungi that produce the drug psilocybin, which is capable to producing life-changing visions of inter-connectedness. Many animals eat or drink substances which intoxicate them. He also describes how a fungus (Orthiocordyceps unilateralis) infects carpenter ants, essentially controlling their behavior and eventually killing them–as if the ant becomes an extension of the fungus (or its tool). Interestingly, Sheldrake doesn’t mention the books of Carlos Castaneda, which so intrigued me in the seventies.

Chapter 5: Before Roots – This chapter examines the relationships between fungi and plants. Fungi first enabled plant life on land, transforming the land and life. Fungi acted as roots before plants had roots to forage underground and gather nutrients from the soil. Now, fungi live in and around roots–mycorrhizal relationships (interconnectedness). Most plants depend on their mycorrhizal fungi to survive, and their mycelium “makes up between a third and a half of the living mass of soils.” As with lichens, the roots and mycorrhizal fungi of the plant collect nutrients from the soil while the upper part of the plant, the green part, collects light and CO2 and manufactures food. Here we learn that it seems to be the fungi which decide who should get what, and how much. This impacts the evolution of life on Earth. Plants associate with various mycorrizal fungi and “develop differently when grown with different [fungal] communities.” Many characteristics (flavor, odor, antioxidant activity…) are determined by which fungal community a plant associates with. (I thought, that could explain why foods, like fruits or cheese or bread of whatever, taste different in different countries.)

Chapter 6: Wood Wide Webs – This chapter focuses on shared (or common) mycorrhizal networks. There is a lot of information about the ghost plant, also known as the Indian pipe plant, Monotropa uniflora, which grows in our woods here in Seneca Creek State Park–a plant which looks like a fungus, because it is a ghostly white instead of green. It turns out that there are a lot of such plants (about 10% of all plants!) without chlorophyll, and they all depend on fungi for the carbon compounds that provide energy for them to live. Another is Voyria; a third is Allotropa virgiata, known as candy canes because they are red and white. Sheldrake calls these fully dependent plants mycoheterotrophs or “mycohets”. Suzanne Simard’s work is discussed in this chapter. Sheldrake considers the situation through a myco-centric perspective rather than a plant-centric one; he points out that we tend to prioritize animals over plants and plants over fungi, which distorts our view of what is happening. This chapter considers how fungal networks provide a way for bacteria, chemicals, nutrients and more to “travel” through the soil and also how huge and complex the fungal networks actually are.

Chapter 7: Radical Mycology – In this chapter, we learn about the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse, the result of plant matter that did not decompose for millions of years. Wood, made of cellulose and lignin, does not break down easily, but white rot fungi are able to break it down, using a process called radical chemistry. The huge amounts of undecomposed forest became our deposits of coal. Fungi can be “trained” to break down toxic waste, such as used cigarette butts. Led by mycologist Paul Stamets, “fungal nerds” are exploring ways to use fungi to solve the problems human civilization has caused. (Cf. Stamets’ TED Talk, Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World.) Stamets “has done more than anyone else to popularize fungal topics.” Fungi could conceivably restore polluted ecosystems (“environmental remediation”). Mushroom nerds are people who come from all walks of life–not just scientists. As entrepreneurs, they have come up with companies like Ecovative, which grows white rot fungi to be used in mycoremediation and licenses others to grow and use the fungi themselves. Fungal Architectures work to create buildings using fungal materials. The Unconventional Computing Laboratory dreams of harnessing mycelial networks to compute data. Mycofabrication can grow substances to wrap damaged skin while it heals, replace the graphite in lithium batteries, grow building materials (in space or in disaster zones) and packaging (replacing styrofoam) and fungal “leather” and shoe soles and dock floats. There seems to be no end to the research and development going on with fungi.

Chapter 8: Making Sense of Fungi – This chapter zeroes in on yeast, a fungus humans have used for thousands of years, to brew beverages and make bread, but yeast also live in and on us. Sheldrake writes that fungi defy classification of the type that we use to organize our knowledge of plants and animals. He considers various attempts to do this and why they have failed.

Epilogue: This Compost – “Fungi make worlds; they also unmake them.” Musings on the amazing properties of fungi.

The above take up about 60% of the book; the rest is comprised of illustrations (which I wish I had realized were there while I was reading!) and copious notes, which I did not refer to while reading.

This book is totally fascinating!