An often entertaining though sometimes erratic paean to the joys of psychedelic adventuring.
An exuberant endorsement of the use of psychedelics as an instrument of self-discovery.
Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind explores the effects of psychedelic drugs, especially LSD and psilocybin, on the damaged psyche, but “only under the supervision of a trained professional.” Nonsense, says Williams, who notes that “Pollan advocates for the use of psilocybin in a clinical setting within an established Western psychopharmocological context.” Such a provision ignores the explorations of “women, indigenous people, old-school hippies, herbalists, and even teenagers” in self-directed trips courtesy of magic mushrooms. The author’s explorations began at the age of 15 and picked up again in adulthood; not for her the old bromide that one should abandon a drug when it no longer has anything to teach. “I almost got arrested is a good answer,” she counters and then adds, “If it happened decades ago, it’s just a memory.” Offering a few useful rules for would-be psychonauts, Williams counsels not to store your drug dealer’s number on your cellphone, share that dealer’s name with friends until you’ve cleared it beforehand, and never show up with less than the amount you need to clear the transaction. Otherwise, “you deserve to be the unlucky victim in one of those scenes that happens in an abandoned dump site in Breaking Bad.” So much for peace and love. Otherwise, she writes, ingest some mushrooms and take a bus across West Texas, digging the vibes—and don’t be like Jane Fonda, who confessed to doing peyote with Lily Tomlin to prepare for a film role but didn’t enjoy the experience. Venturing into New Age territory, Williams even advises that one doesn’t need to eat a plant such as datura in order to “have a powerful relationship with it”; sometimes it’s enough just to have it on hand to dig its essence and head out into the cosmos.
An often entertaining though sometimes erratic paean to the joys of psychedelic adventuring.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948340-31-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Dottir Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fun if overly flamboyant appreciation of a TV giant.
A biography of American late-night television’s biggest star.
Zehme, author of biographies of Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner, had a lifelong love of Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. In 1973, at age 15, Zehme was “already a full-blown Carson fanboy.” As a reporter for Rolling Stone, he tried unsuccessfully to secure an interview to coincide with Carson’s 1992 retirement after a 30-year run. In 2002, Zehme, now with Esquire, “gets extended face time” with the star for a piece to mark 10 years since Carson’s departure. Shortly after Carson’s death in 2005, Zehme began work on a biography. The task was overwhelming—“there was always more to be gleaned”—even before Zehme’s 2013 diagnosis of stage 4 colorectal cancer. He died in 2023, having finished only the first three-quarters of this biography. Thomas, a longtime Chicago arts reporter, has completed the book in time for Carson’s 2025 centenary. The result is an admiring work that nonetheless acknowledges the lows as well as the highs of Carson’s life—he had three divorces—and career, from his ill-fated 1955 variety program The Johnny Carson Show, to his 1957-62 stint as host of the ABC game show Who Do You Trust?, to his taking over The Tonight Show from Jack Paar in 1962. It’s easy to tell where Zehme left off and Thomas took over. The tone changes dramatically, from Zehme’s florid style to Thomas’s drier approach. Those florid passages, which make up most of the book, are baroque in the extreme, with lines like, “And so, like sun and moon and oxygen and ionosphere, Johnny Carson was always there, reliable and steadfast.” Despite the purple prose, the result is an entertaining look at not only a unique figure in 20th-century popular culture but also a bygone era in American television.
A fun if overly flamboyant appreciation of a TV giant.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781451645279
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
An unflinching self-portrait.
The tumultuous life of a bisexual, autistic comic.
In her debut memoir, Scottish comedian Brady recounts the emotional turmoil of living with undiagnosed autism. “The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who love trains or science,” she writes, “that many women miss out on diagnosis and are thought of as studious instead.” She was nothing if not studious, obsessively focused on foreign languages, but she found it difficult to converse in her own language. From novels, she tried to gain “knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor” that others found so familiar. Often frustrated and overwhelmed by sensory overload, she erupted in violent meltdowns. Her parents, dealing with behavior they didn’t understand—including self-cutting—sent her to “a high-security mental hospital” as a day patient. Even there, a diagnosis eluded her; she was not accurately diagnosed until she was 34. Although intimate friendships were difficult, she depicts her uninhibited sexuality and sometimes raucous affairs with both men and women. “I grew up confident about my queerness,” she writes, partly because of “autism’s lack of regard for social norms.” While at the University of Edinburgh, she supported herself as a stripper. “I liked that in a strip club men’s contempt of you was out in the open,” she admits. “In the outside world, misogyny was always hovering in your peripheral vision.” When she worked as a reporter for the university newspaper, she was assigned to try a stint as a stand-up comic and write about it; she found it was work she loved. After “about a thousand gigs in grim little pubs across England,” she landed an agent and embarked on a successful career. Although Brady hopes her memoir will “make things feel better for the next autistic or misfit girl,” her anger is as evident as her compassion.
An unflinching self-portrait.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593582503
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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