The First International Conference was held in New York City in 1999, and this book collects the proceedings, plus more. Adding to pharmaceutical and toxicology research is new information regarding therapies that use ibogaine, including traditional Bwiti therapies, various encounter and shock therapies, dream therapies—even amateur therapies using ibogaine in uncontrolled doses, based on self-help models. [ read more ]
Across eleven chapters, Pickover cuts a wide swath with his literary machete, hacking through such subjects as language, DMT, machine elves, Terence McKenna, his hometown in upstate New York, book publishing, the virus theory of language, Einstein, God, transcendence, the Big Crunch, and, oh yeah, Burning Man. ... Sex, Drugs, Einstein, & Elves isn’t so much a coherent narrative as a pastiche of thoughts, a stew where nearly everything – including a porcelain kitchen sink – has been tossed in. [ read more ]
Each of Carpenter’s chapters contains numerous descriptions of encounters with what seems to be an internal ecology of the mind. If nothing else, even if you take Carpenter’s writing with a grain or even a boulder of salt, this makes for some very interesting reading on at least a science-fiction level, like some DXM remix of Flatland or A Voyage to Arcturus. [ read more ]
The background that Moffitt Cook provides is “just enough,” and one can listen to the musical track without feeling mentally overloaded or taxed. The accompanying CD consists of 18 representative songs that each particular shaman uses. [ read more ]
It may be a rare thing for a second edition of a book to warrant its own review, but such is definitely the case with the new edition of the Schultes’ and Hofmann’s 1979 classic Plants of the Gods. Any and all criticism of this book should be viewed as minor, as it is truly a marvelous work. Rätsch has taken a great book and made it better. Especially if you own the first edition, you owe it to yourself to pick up this revamp. It is visual delight, a joy to read cover-to-cover, and it will no doubt be revisited repeatedly for years to come. [ read more ]
Sutin seems to have no agenda beyond telling us the story of his subject’s life as well as can be gathered from the source material available (which he seems to have studied well). Sutin makes no claims without verifiable sources, and he also does a fine job of carefully and fairly pointing out inconsistencies and differing accounts from different sources (or sometimes from different works by Crowley himself). This is refreshing, as most writers on Crowley seem to want to either condemn or praise him. [ read more ]
Ball offers a practical guide to ways of thinking about mushrooms and their capabilities. [ read more ]
...informative, well researched and well presented. Neither a coffee table book nor light reading, Booth’s work is an in-depth look at the cultural history of the cannabis plant that manages to be both readable and educating. [ read more ]
Some of the material in this book is irreducibly technical and will be intelligible only to people with backgrounds in chemistry. However, the novice reader can easily skim the brief technical digressions and understand the majority of the book.
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...a fascinating book about a Peruvian shaman who performs (or performed) healing ceremonies employing San Pedro cactus as the sacrament and medicine. Evidently this book is a transcription of a filmed documentary that took place in 1978. Even with nothing but the black-and-white still shots from the film as illustration, the book sustains the reader’s interest from cover to cover. [ read more ]