North American Mushrooms: A Field Guide to Edible and Inedible Fungi

by Orson K. Miller Jr., Hope H. Miller, hope miller

Book Overview

North American Mushrooms is a field guide to more than 600 edible and inedible mushrooms that can be found across the United States and Canada. Filled with full color photographs, detailed identification information, and illustrated keys and glossaries to assist with identification, this book also features mushroom lore and helpful information on gathering and using wild mushrooms.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0762731095
• ISBN13: 9780762731091
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Falcon Press Publishing
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 2.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

book

North American Mushrooms: A Field Guide to Edible and Inedible Fungi (Falconguide) I attended a class on identifying mushrooms and this book was highly recomended and I under stand why. it is a very good book on this topic.

Very useful in its own rite

Overall, this book is great for the beginner. It includes great color photographs of every mushroom covered. Though it contains only 180 species of mushrooms across North America, it is still a great field guide for the beginner. The book also contains a very easy and clear-cut method for classifying the mushrooms that you found. It is definitely good classification and identification practice for the beginner. Overall, it is a good field guide with nice color pictures.

Understand what you are buying

This is a good book in the right hands. If you are looking for the definative book on mushrooms, it hasn't been published. The closest equivalent to definative is the David Arora Mushrooms Demystified. This book by Miller is a FIELD GUIDE (and maybe 1/5 the size and weight of Demystified), it is very, very short on the number of species covered ('only' hundreds out of thousands). Do not use this book to decide if you have harvested an edible mushroom. There are a great many edible mushrooms that look like a great many inedible and poisonious mushrooms and YOU CANNOT DO IDENTIFICATION BY COMPARING PICTURES. Understand I am not in any way dissing this book; Miller knew his stuff, and this is an excellent guide. I bought a copy when it was first available, and it has already seen several days in the field. I learned about it from a well respected expert who had also purchased a copy. But I also already had a well used copy of Arora, and I have been foraging for many years, and I have gotten instruction from people like Larry Evens, Gary Lincoff and David Arora, and I STILL MAKE MISTAKES. The critical feature of a field guide is the Key that walks you through the identification process. This book (Miller) has a somewhat simplier key, that I can run through quickly (and larger type which is nice for old eyes in the middle of the forest). I would never eat off the identification from this book or any other. I have already found semi-common specimens where I know the species, that Miller doesn't cover. It's a nice addition to a library that also includes something specific for your region, plus Arora's Demystified. I would take the time to put a plastic cover on it, and it is a good bit heavier than the Audubon guide. However, if it comes to it, I will be carrying this guide in my backpack rather than any of the others I own (and I own a bunch of mushroom books).

Over six hundred color photos and line drawings offer important identification keys

If only one field guide to North American mushrooms is to be obtained for a reference holding, make it NORTH AMERICAN MUSHROOMS: A FIELD GUIDE TO EDIBLE AND INEDIBLE FUNGI. Over six hundred color photos and line drawings offer important identification keys and a comprehensive survey of where and how to gather wild mushrooms. Pictorial keys throughout enhance suggestions for location and identification as well as culinary use, and come from one of the most respected mycologists in this country, also a professor of Botany and Curator of Fungi. He's written six books on fungi and has authored 105 new species new to science in his papers: his is a masterpiece including sturdy binding for solid field use. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

New Mushroom Book

Yet another New Mushroom Book. This is a good overall book that covers a good cross section of fungi, some that were familiar to me and some that were not. Orson K. Miller has released other Mushroom books, and all are good, this one is no exception. If you are already into Mushrooms you most likely have a library of books, and you may feel that you don't need another, but I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in mushroom identification, it cover a lot of basics and seems to have updated, more current info, and scientific names.