Review of reviews: Books

lished that a forest is a sentient, interacting community in which certain mature trees, or “mother trees,” act as hubs for the distribution of nutrients and lifesustaining information. Simard’s work “turned the tables on the view of trees as engaged in a fierce competition with one another,” said Richard Schiffman in CSMonitor.com. Her model of forest life, she notes, aligns closely with the understanding of indigenous people. “Still, not everyone is a fan.” Commercial loggers have resisted her recommendations, and some scientists criticize her language as overly anthropomorphic.

Simard at times does push her metaphors too far, said Eugenia Bone in The Wall Street Journal. “I chafe when genetic adaptation is called ‘wisdom,’” for example.

Still, the analogies do help readers understand the biology, and many are “surprisingly apt,” such as when Simard invokes brain cells and neural pathways to describe the hub-and-node system by which information is passed from mycorrhizal fungi to tree roots. In the end, this book “might even persuade you that organisms other than ourselves, even fungi, have agency.”