Books (For Reviews Only)
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Consciousness—long relegated to scholarly debates—is suddenly more than an academic issue, arising in current controversies over the moral status of artificial intelligence and invertebrates. This head subject is the topic of popular science writer Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears, which offers readers a charming, witty, insightful, and eccentric account of Pollan’s efforts to…
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The bestselling American author’s new book is an illuminating inquiry into the essence of being alive. If you’re a Financial Times subscriber, you can read this review here on their website, too. At a philosophy conference in Tucson in 1994, David Chalmers, a young Australian studying in the US, delivered a paper in which he…
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OPB’s Dave Miller spoke to Michael Pollan in front of an audience at the Newmark Theatre July 27 in Portland in an event put on by Powell’s Boons. This was one stop in Pollan’s West Coast leg of his paperback tour for This is Your Mind on Plants. Four years prior to this recording, Michael…
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At the root of each case study is a pair of questions: the first asks why, as a species, we have gone to extraordinary lengths to propagate and disseminate these consciousness-changing molecules, and the second is why they are subject to paranoia and regulation in differing degrees.
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His descriptions of London’s coffee house culture and Honoré de Balzac’s barbarous habit of ingesting dry coffee grounds to fuel all-night scribbling sessions are worth the book’s price alone.
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In his new book, “This Is Your Mind on Plants,” Michael Pollan wagers “that the decline of the drug war, with its brutally simplistic narratives … has opened a space in which we can tell some other, much more interesting stories about our ancient relationship with the mind-altering plants and fungi with which nature has…
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Pollan (How to Change Your Mind) centers this lucid exploration of the psycho-social impact of mind-altering plants on his personal experiences with opium, mescaline, and, most intensely, caffeine. He starts with an extended version of his 1997 Harper’s piece about brewing opium tea from poppies, which produced mild euphoria—“the tea seemed to subtract things: anxiety, melancholy, worry,…
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Building on his lysergically drenched book How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan looks at three plant-based drugs and the mental effects they can produce. The disastrous war on drugs began under Nixon to control two classes of perceived enemies: anti-war protestors and Black citizens. That cynical effort, writes the author, drives home the point…
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In his new book How To Change Your Mind: The new science of psychedelics, Michael Pollan sets out the twentieth-century history of the use of “psychedelic” substances with clarity, insight and humour. He does his fieldwork – with appropriate trepidation. He goes mushroom hunting. He consumes four different psychedelic tryptamines under suitably controlled conditions – LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca…
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In 1938 Albert Hofmann, a chemist at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, created a series of new compounds from lysergic acid. One of them, later marketed as Hydergine, showed great potential for the treatment of cerebral arteriosclerosis. Another salt, the diethylamide (LSD), he put to one side, but he had “a peculiar presentiment,” as he…
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When Pollan agrees to take psychedelic drugs, he presents himself as a stand-in for the skeptical reader; he is an LSD-virgin turned “psychonaut” for the purposes of journalistic and scientific inquiry.