My Instagram feed is currently riddled with mushroom advertisements. A mushroom beverage exceeds coffee for focus and health benefits! Mushroom face serums provide youthful, plump-celled, and small-pored complexions! Another mushroom supplement rivals Xanax! To say nothing of the anti-dementia mushrooms, cancer-fighting mushrooms, gut health mushrooms, and luxury magic mushroom retreats! In 2022, The New York Times named mushrooms the “ingredient of the year” and the U.S. food broker Presence hailed “mushroom everything” alongside carbonated sodas, relaxation supplements, and sleep supplements.
But how did mushrooms—a largely marginalized category of beings—develop such prominence in popular imagination?
It is tempting to finish the review with reference to a beautiful essay about the love between herself and her father and the oomph in the last line in this last essay but it might be better to whet the appetite with the wonderful, wobbling incongruities in the opening line of the title essay which make it hard not to read on: “Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the Gulf Coast of Texas.”
If that is an opener that leaves you with an un-scratchable itch to find out where the hell that essay goes then this one’s for you.
Lessons covers eight decades in the life of Roland, a twice-married tearoom pianist at “a second-rank London hotel”. From his postwar military childhood in Libya (not the only detail he shares with his author) through the Thatcher years, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Blair, 9/11, Brexit and, yes, Covid; from schoolboy masturbation to arthritic widowhood; from the hard yards of childcare to the pang of the empty nest, the everyday milestones of Roland’s life tick by to the inescapable rhythm of the headlines: “How could he complain... when his son [Lawrence] was not at risk from smallpox or polio, or from snipers hidden in the hills above Sarajevo?”
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 may have ended the war with Japan, but it was the firebombing of Tokyo, five months earlier, that likely won it.
Neither decision came lightly, obviously. It was President Truman, four months into his presidency, who made the call to unleash “the force from which the sun draws its power.”
But the decision to firebomb Tokyo — the most destructive air attack in history — was made by a lower-tier general named Curtis LeMay, stationed on Guam.
The hope expressed in Driving with Strangers is that the continuing presence of young hitchhikers – long before middle age when most of us, including Purkis himself, appear to give it up – and others who share their general outlook means an alternative future remains possible. Though the capacity-building and political re-imagining that Purkis would like to see emerge seems almost unrealisable in these conflictual and alienating times, we should not forget the mutuality and generosity that were brought to the forefront of everyday life during the COVID-19 pandemic. If that could be harnessed in a political movement, we might even find ourselves hitchhiking again.