Just the thing for a budding myconaut. A few copies will doubtless make the rounds at the DEA, too.
An exuberant, approving account of psilocybin and its kin for those of us living in what debut author Letcher calls “the Mushroom Age.”
Others would put that magical time back a few decades to the period when Timothy Leary was running around with madcap subjects of the Psilocybin Project, among them Allen Ginsberg, who found in a good dose of magic ’shrooms authorization to become the Messiah. (“He intended to walk the streets of Cambridge instructing people to stop hating one another. Careful redirection persuaded him against this somewhat inadvisable course of action.”) Still, Letcher ably charts the maiden voyages and great space-trucking expeditions of “myconauts” such as Gordon Wasson, the banker who took profound interest in the effects of mushroom consumption on history and ventured strange theories about Jesus, the Russians and suchlike topics in the course of his fungal odyssey, which began in the late 1920s. Wasson had heirs, of a sort, in Leary (who never met a weird idea he didn’t like) and in the poet Robert Graves, who enjoyed sleeping with whatever hippie chicks crossed his path in the ’60s even though he didn’t much enjoy the drug himself. (Graves advocated mushroom tripping at key moments such as the onset of puberty and the approach of death, but added, “Not that I should care to enroll myself in any such cult.”) Profiling with enthusiasm such relatively recent myconauts as the late Terence McKenna, who wedded psychedelia to cyberia during the 1980s and ’90s, Letcher laments that there’s no big, Leary-like figure to lead the mushroom charge today. He makes it clear, though, that many devotees around the world still enjoy the “chemical jiggery-pokery” of replacing alpha waves with beta waves, knocking down serotonin feedback loops and otherwise short-circuiting their heads in the interest of finding what lies beyond.
Just the thing for a budding myconaut. A few copies will doubtless make the rounds at the DEA, too.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-082828-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
