Mushrooms of Northeastern North America

Simply the best mushroom guide for anybody who is seriously interested in mushrooms in the NE. You WILL have to familiarize yourself with mycological terminology and the general taxonomy of mushrooms to be able to use this book effectively, and it is not akin to a Sibley bird guide where you can just flip through the pages and find your specimen. Often the keys lead you to microscopic or chemical staining analysis of the mushrooms, which can definitely be frustrating if you don't have the capacity to do these analyses. A more basic, field friendly guide (the book is large) might be better for someone who just wants to poke around in the woods, find a mushroom, and take a stab at what it might be. But if you are serious about mycology and you want an exhaustive treatment of mushrooms, this is your book. I own three Bessette books, this one, Mushrooms of the SE, and Boletes, and all are excellent within the caveats expressed in this reivew.

Absolutely 5 stars! It's Must for everybody who likes mushroom hunting since this book is a "Mushroom encyclopedia of the Northeast". Although it doesn't substitute for everything, nothing better has been yet written on this topic. However, I would suggest to put stickers in the book to mark the pages with mushroom pictures. And then, "go backwards": first, look at the pictures and after that, read the descriptions. Doing the opposite may get confusing. A little odd organization of the book just makes it much-much cheaper for us to buy it. And I believe it was very thoughtful for Alan Bessette to arrange it this way in spite of many people critique since such a design of publication makes the book well compatible with our family budgets that would be hardly so had he arranged it otherwise.

Very difficult to use effectively as an identification tool since there are few photos and they are not of great quality and they are nowhere near the description of the mushroom itself.On a positive note, the mushroom descriptions are very detailed.

This is my go-to book when I need to identify mushrooms. I have a bunch of mushroom identification books and always go back to this one. Nice color photos, and the keys I need to help identify the species. Well organized. Doesn't cover the vast variety of boletes, so I bought it with the North American Boletes book by the same author.

This book was purchased at the request of my husband, who has been hunting and researching mushrooms for many years. We read many of the reviews posted and wondered if the pictures would be too small or blurry or confusing, but decided to try it anyway, and he just received it today and is quite satisfied with it; finds the format similar to other books he has and thinks it makes a great study book for those who are already pretty well informed. He particularly liked the section on boletes, and thinks the research is very comprehensive.

Great reference book and very useful! The alphabetic organization of the photos and genus/species descriptions is helpful and time saving. I did not find the photographs to be too small as some have said. They are certainly large enough to aid in IDing species. Organizing the index by species name is novel and was a little surprising at first, but now that I'm used to it, I like that system.

Very big reference book packed with a huge amount of information to aid in the correct identification of mushrooms. This isn't a picture book to page through. Great in helping clear up some gray areas of doubt that may have been left by other field guides and websites. When it comes to mushrooms there are no "stand alone" sources of information but this one certainly helps.

I bought this as a Christmas gift for my brother. He loved it!