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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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