Mushrooms Demystified: A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Fungi

This hard to find book is great. Arora did a great job. The keys very good, are easy to use and the descriptions of each mushroom identified in the book are comprehensive and even entertaining. (A dicot' key can be a truly horrid thing.) The illustrations for key features also very helpful. Even for casual reading it is entertaining! The Fifth Kingdom is a great addition to this book for addl info about life cycles.

A VERY GOOD REFERENCE, BUT ALMOST TOO MUCH INFO TO PROCESS FOR THE BEGINNER.

THE comprehensive guide to mushrooms. I own several that I like, and this is probably the best of them. It's large size makes it unsuitable for a field guide, but it's a great resource. Just get "All that the rain promises...," or the Audubon book for a field guide.

I am a biology teacher and own two tracts of woods. I bought two cheaper books thinking, foolishly, that I would then be able to identify most mushrooms. Cheap and thin is easy to carry in the woods, but this is the "mushroom bible" all naturalists should own. Arora handles a jargon rich science exquisitely. His use of humor in a virtual textbook takes away the thick book intimidation factor. Academia could learn a lot from David's style. I wish all the pictures were in color, but that would increase the price and thickness of the volume tremendously. I will add a few other field guides with color pictures for referencing. I now have a hard time believing there are still copies available for sale. I don't know who in their right mind would sell such a volume. I'll have mine until the end.

I love this book.

I am a near total beginner. My previous experience was looking at chanterelles and king boletes with an experienced mushroomer.

My few lessons kept me grazing during a long wet packing trip. I brought home pictures of mushrooms I thought were interesting. This book helped me get started on identifying them.

NOTE - DO NOT IDENTIFY USING PICTURES, USE THE ID GUIDES IN THE BOOK

Frankly, it is the identification guides that are most valuable to me as a beginner. Without them, I'd be tempted to use pictures in a pocket guide. That works fine for fauna, but can be fatal for fungi.

My experience with the book itself is that I am goal oriented when I pick it up. "What is that one?" I then find myself having fun browsing through the book. It just draws me in. I love the parts saying "edible, but not worth it" or "supposedly edible, but I never cared to try".

I wouldn't expect kids to enjoy this book, but they're generally too impulsive to trust around unknown fungi anyway.