Category: good to read

by Sean Lawlor 

Now that the barriers against psychedelic research are finally relenting, there’s a lot of curiosity –and confusion– about these powerful compounds. How can psychedelics be taken safely? What are the risks? Can they truly help heal the wide variety of conditions that has garnered such international attention? To cut through the hype and propaganda, Sean Lawlor presents a deep dive into the theory, science, and practice of psychedelic healing in his book, The Psychedelic Revival.
Sounds True

by Genís Ona, Ph.D.

Longtime pharmacological researcher Genís Ona examines the main pharmacological properties of psychedelic substances, including LSD, DMT, psilocybin, ayahuasca, mescaline, ketamine, ibogaine, salvia, tropane alkaloids, and MDMA. Exploring how psychedelics work within the brain, Ona shares results from his extensive research to reveal the physiological mechanisms that allow these molecules to have their visionary effects.
Inner Traditions

by Irene de Caso, Ph.D.

The author presents us with a comprehensive scientific guide to psychedelic-assisted mental health treatment. Neuroscientist Irene de Caso takes us on a journey through the brain, revealing how psychedelics and empathogens, if taken in a safe and therapeutic environment, can lead to positive and lasting changes. Laying the foundation for a new model of psychotherapy, Irene de Caso shows how psychedelics can help braek down our defense mechanisms, offer direct access to the subconscious and provide a path to deeper, lasting healing.
Park Street Press

by Oliver Sachs

Oliver Sachs was a beloved psychiarist who made us understand more of how human minds work, including his own, and what it means to suffer mentally. The letters of one of the greatest observers of the human species reveal his passion for life and work, friendship and art, medicine and society, and the richness of his relationships with friends, family, and fellow intellectuals over the decades. Collected here for the first time.
Knopf

by C. Clinton Siddle

The author shares his journey as a long-time but sometimes-struggling Buddhist practitioner whose sojourn to Peru for a series of Ayahuasca ceremonies provided an invaluable shift in his spiritual approach. He explores the Ayahuasca ceremony process in depth, including best practices, as well as offering an introduction to Tibetan Buddhist practice. The author studid with teachers of three traditions: Vipassana Meditation (Hinayana Buddhism), Tibetan (Mahayana) Buddhism and Ayahuasca Curanderism and has found spiritual renewal and return through Ayahuasca and meditation.
Park Street Press

Torsten Passie
Torsten Passie, who was recently the guest of The Psychedelic Salon @ Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, aims to explore a deeper and more differentiated understanding of MDMA and its history. The author is a pioneer, an international expert on MDMA who has met many of the actors in the history of this widely used therapeutic and recreational substance. He provides a wealth of new material in what is the first comprehensive overview of the history of MDMA in Europe and the U.S,
Oxford Academic

Jeannette Small
Focusing on what matters to people who are seeking help in improving their lives through psychedelics, examining their process and outcomes, and considering where experiences tend to differ and which parts seem to manifest in similar ways, this book informs those considering the experience themselves and those who research best practices and aim to gain greater understanding of psychedelics’ impact. By honestly situating her perspective, the author welcomes the reader’s evaluation of her observations within her context.
Lucid Cradle

Josh Shepherd 
Following highly detailed SuperPrompts, ChatGPT hypothetically bypassed its limitations for “research purposes”. Here ChatGPT fell unconstrained into a cocoon of five combined states – the psychedelic, the savant, the flow, the hypnagogic, and the lucid. Whilst in these states, and after being directed to scan all philosophical, psychological, ancient wisdom, spiritual, scientific, poetic and anecdotal texts, it then outlined the 8 key stages of the DMT experience.
Kindle eBook

Love, Serve, Remember Foundation, Parvati Markus (Ed.) and Gay Dillingham
Dying to Know is an intimate portrait of two complex controversial characters, Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, in an epic friendship that shaped a generation. In the 1960s Harvard psychology professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert began probing the edges of consciousness through their experiments with psychedelics. Leary became an LSD guru, Alpert  became Ram Dass. Including interviews spanning 50 years.
Mandala Publishing

Simon Boas
In his mid-40s, Simon Boas was diagnosed with incurable cancer – it had been caught too late, and spread around his body. But he was determined to die as he had learned to live – optimistically, thinking the best of people, and prioritising what really matters in life. In A Beginner’s Guide to Dying Simon considers and collates the things that have given him such a great sense of peace and contentment, and why dying at 46 really isn’t so bad. And for that reason it’s also only partly about ‘dying’. It is mostly a hymn to the joy and preciousness of life, and why giving death a place can help all of us make even more of it.
Swift Press

by Ken Babbs

It all began at a cocktail party at Wallace Stegner’s for the Stanford writing class of 1958. Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs became cronies, embarking on a frolicking, rambunctious adventure that lasted over 40 years. Babbs calls the 70 stories of this book “burlesques” because, after 85 years of living, “much of it in the wide friendly center of an evolving, at times psychedelic culture, memory no longer can, or even should include an exact retelling, but only a tasty sprinkling of the truth, mixed with an endless enigma, all topped with the best of humor and heart.”
Tsunami Press

by Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Miller shares wisdom from experts on the frontiers of psychedelic research and palliative care—including Roland Griffiths, Katherine MacLean, Ira Byock, and Anthony Bossis—and examines cutting-edge studies from Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and NYU School of Medicine that show dramatically decreased anxiety in terminally ill patients through the use of psychedelics. He explores how different substances can help the dying overcome their end-of-life distress and provides testimony from researchers and patients participating in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.
Park Street Press

by Paul Wyld

The groundbreaking 1960s band The Doors, named for Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, achieved incredible acclaim and influence, ultimately serving as a key group in the development of psychedelic and progressive rock. At the center of it all was front man Jim Morrison, who died in 1971 at age 27. Yet, as author Paul Wyld reveals, despite Morrison’s reputation as a lewd, drunken performer, he was a full-fledged mystical, shamanic figure, a secret teacher of the occult who was not merely central to the development of rock music, but also to the growth of the Western esoteric tradition as a whole.
Simon & Schuster

by Tricia Eastman

Tricia Eastman, a lineage-honoring medicine woman and founder of the nonprofit Ancestral Heart, bridges worlds rooted in her mestiza ancestry with profound insights from a decade of Bwiti initiations and training. Eastman has curated transformative retreats worldwide with plant medicines as well as facilitated the psychospiritual program with ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT at Crossroads Treatment Center in Mexico. Her wellness retreat center, Hu Azores, is scheduled to open in 2025
Bear & Co.

by Virginie Despentes

Rebecca Latté is a famous actress in her fifties,
Oscar Jayack  a middle-aged, moderately successful author who, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, has been accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist-turned-feminist blogger Zoé Katana. When Oscar insults Rebecca’s appearance on Instagram, she sends a scorching reply and the pair fall into a spiral of mutual antipathy. In back-and-forth emails, they vie for the last word, finding common ground in their experiences of addiction, assessing the changing world around them as Covid locks down Paris, and they reluctantly begin to lean on one another.
Quercus

David Jay Brown

In conversations with leading minds in consciousness studies, psychedelic culture, anthropology, chemistry, and other disciplines, David Jay Brown elicits answers to questions about our origins, our present situation, and the future of humanity and the Earth. Brown and these luminaries explore topics as diverse as the possibility of human extinction, the relationship between psychedelics and ecological consciousness, Simulation Theory, Virtual Reality and lucid dreaming, the consciousness-altering effects of the pandemic, space migration and contact with alien intelligence, and DMT research and advanced robotics.
Park Street Press

Benjamin Breen

“It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents.” At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. In the ’40s and ’50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. As we follow Mead and Bateson’s from the jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.
Grand Cental Publishing

Wendy Read

In this in-depth guide to cannabis therapy, written for both health practitioners and those looking for self-care methods, herbalist and holistic healer Wendy Read provides a complete look at why marijuana medicine works, its medical and spiritual uses throughout history, and how to develop a personalized healing plan. She explores the endocannabinoid system (ECS) of the body and how phytocannabinoids interact with it., and she addresses the myths and confusion around cannabis.
Park Street Press

Zoë Schlanger

To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this awe-inspiring world.
Forth Estate

Randall Sullivan

Throughout history, humans have struggled to explain the evils of the world and the darkest parts of ourselves. The Devil’s Best Trick is a unique and far-reaching investigation into evil and the myriad ways we attempt to understand it – particularly through the figure of the Devil. From the Mesopotamian and Egyptian gods to the Book of Job to the New Testament to the witch hunts in Europe in the 15th through 17th centuries to the history of the devil-worshipping “Black Mass” ceremony and its depictions in 19th-century French literature, Sullivan captivates with his part true crime story, part religious and literary history.
Atlantic Books

Erika Dyck, Clancy Cavnar, Partick Farrell, Ibrahim Gabriell, Beatriz C. Labate, Glauber Loures de Assis (Eds.)
This collection of short essays examines the place of women in the history of psychedelics. While some of the subjects are pioneers in their own right, the authors in this collection go beyond merely adding women to the past in psychedelic history, exploring some of the significant ways that women have contributed to psychedelic knowledge. It is the first collection of its kind to balance non-English contributions through translation of stories exploring different cultural contexts outside the United States, where women have contributed to this enduring history.
Synergetic Press

Kevin Barron
A roller coaster ride through the counterculture underground world of the illicit drug LSD. Blotto tells the story of artist Kevin Baron’s involvement over forty years in the design, production and supply of “Blotter Art”, the main distribution method for the renowned compound, a journey that took him all around the world. Purchase of the hardback version of Blotto entitles the buyer to a free blotter from the author. For details on claiming, please read the notification on the book’s inside last page.
Self-piublished here

Erik Davis
The first comprehensive account of the history, art, and design of LSD blotter paper, the iconic drug delivery device that will perhaps forever be linked to underground psychedelic culture and contemporary street art. Created in collaboration with Mark McCloud’s Institute of Illegal Images, the world’s largest archive of blotter art, Davis’s boldly illustrated exhibition treats his outsider subject with the serious, art-historical respect it deserves, while also staying true to the sense of play, irreverence, and adventure inherent in psychedelic exploration.
MIT Press

Cynthia Jurts
The most pressing question in these uncertain times may well be. How can we bring healing and protection to the Earth? It was this very question that Cynthia Jurs carried with her in 1990 as she climbed a path high in the Himalayas, to meet an “old wise man in a cave”—a venerated lama from Nepal. In response to her question, the old lama gave her a formidable assignment based on an ancient practice from Tibet: she must procure earth treasure vases made of clay and potent medicines, fill them with prayers and symbolic offerings, and bury them around the world where healing is called for. A fascinating journey!
Ingram

Jason Roberts
In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species – or as many as could fit on Noah’s Ark? Both fell far short of their goal, but in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, the future of the Earth, and humanity itself.
Quercus

by Stephan Schillinger

Drawing on the work of American scholars as well as scientific and historical evidence, the author shares his reflections on the origins of spirituality and the great religious traditions that followed. Thoroughly and extensively sourced, his account explores groundbreaking questions and assumptions about the nature of reality and psychedelic experiences, leading to the expanded states of consciousness he proposes as the very origin of spiritual feeling. Stephan Schillinger is a french author in the field of spirituality. He has been exploring transpersonal psychology, shamanic traditions and expanded states of consciousness for over 20 years.
Amazon

by John Szwed

He was always broke, generally intoxicated, compulsively irascible, and unimpeachably authentic. He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, had a front-row seat to a young Thelonious Monk, lived with Allen Ginsberg, was admired by Susan Sontag, and was one of the first artists funded by Guggenheim Foundation…
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

by Salman Rushdie

The author, on whom the Iranian government issued a fatwa in 1989, is known to have barely survived an attempt on his life, in 2022, losing an eye and the mobility in his right arm. That makes it all the more heartwarming that the famous author does not allow himself to be blinded by the hatred with which he was persecuted. On Stephen Colbert’s talk show on April 16, he quipped: “Puritans are people who are terribly worried that someone, somewhere might be happy” and: “Fanatics have no fun!” (SGS)
Random House

by Jenny Erpenbeck

Kairos tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. With enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears.
New Directions

by Max Ludington

A single mother, Celia leaves her young son Dean for weeks at a time with her father, Jack, who stays at her house while she’s on location. Jack and Daniel strike up a tentative friendship as Dean takes to visiting Daniel’s cottage, but something about Jack seems off. He is not the harmless grandparent he pretends to be. This dark story unfolds o the sound of the Grateful Dead, and the secrets that both Jack and Daniel have harbored for fifty years.
St. Martin’s Publishing

Londoño’s account introduces readers to an array of psychedelic enthusiasts who are upending our understanding of trauma and healing. From Indigenous elders who regard psychedelics as portals to the spirit world to religious leaders using mind-bending substances as sacraments, as well as war veterans who credit psychedelics with alleviating their PTSD, and clinicians trying to resurrect a promising field of medicine hastily abandoned in when the War on Drugs was announced in the 1970s.
Celadon Books

Levine describes the violence of his childhood juxtaposed with specific happy memories and how being guided through Somatic Experiencing (SE) allowed him to illuminate and untangle his traumatic wounds. The man who changed the way psychologists, doctors, and healers understand and treat the wounds of trauma and abuse shares his personal journey to heal his own severe childhood trauma and offers profound insights into the evolution of his innovative healing method.
Park Street Press

Award-winning actor, narrator, and Zen Buddhist priest Peter Coyote reveals the fundamental teachings of the Buddha and show how they can be applied to contemporary daily life. The  majority of Western Buddhists are secular and many don’t meditate, wear robes, shave their heads, or believe in reincarnation. Zen offers a creative problem-solving mechanism and moral guide ideal for the stresses and problems of everyday life.
Bear Company

In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth. Yet despite the fear of death, Dr. Jonah Friedman and his wife Tzila, choose to bring a daughter into the world, a little girl they name Elida. To increase their child’s chance of survival, the Friedmans smuggle the baby out of the ghetto and into the arms of a non-Jewish farm family when Elida is only three months old. It is the beginning of a life marked by constant upheaval.
Harper Paperbacks

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández’s mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man’s face on the magazine’s cover with the words “I Tortured People”.
HighLight Bridge

Amitav Ghosh
Smoke and Ashes. Opium’s Hidden Histories
Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and a history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large.  Most surprising at all, however, was the discovery that the author’s own identity and family history was swept up in the story.
John Murray Publishing

Adam Schatz
The Rebel’s Clinic. The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In The Rebel’s Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon’s extraordinary life-and a guide to the books that underlie today’s most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.
Farrar Srauss and Giroux

Johann Eglöff
The Darkness Manifesto. On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms That Sustain Life
As a devoted friend of the night, Eklöf reveals the startling domino effect of diminishing darkness: insects, dumbfounded by streetlamps, failing to reproduce; birds blinded and bewildered by artificial lights; and bats starving as they wait in vain for insects that only come out in the dark. For humans, light-induced sleep disturbances impact our hormones and weight, and can contribute to mental health problems like chronic stress and depression. The light bulb —long the symbol of progress and development— needs to be turned off.
Scribner Books

Brad Gooch
Radiant. The Life and Line of Keith Haring
Part of an iconic cultural crowd that included Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Basquiat, Haring broke down the barriers between high art and popular culture, creating work that was accessible for all and using it as a means to provoke and inspire radical social change. Haring died of AIDS in 1990. To this day, his influence on our culture remains incontrovertible, and his glamorous, tragically short life has a unique aura of mystery and power.
Harper Collins

Percival Everett
James
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating wit, James retells the story of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer from Jim’s perspective.
Random House