Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics
Erica Dyck, Chris Elcock (Eds.)
The authors in this collection explore everything from LSD psychotherapy in communist Czechoslovakia to the first applications of LSD-25 in South America to the intersection of modernism and ayahuasca in China. Along the way, they also consider how psychedelic experiments generated their own cultural expressions, where the specter of the United States may have loomed large and where colonial empires exerted influence on the local reception of psychedelics in botanical and pharmaceutical pursuits.
MIT Press
Tripping On Utopia. Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science
Benjamin Breen
In the ’40s and ’50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists—and star-crossed lovers—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
Grand Central Publishing
The Heart and Its Healing Plants. Traditional Herbal remedies and Modern Heart Conditions
Wolf D. Storl, Ph.D.
An ethnobotanical look at ancient heart beliefs, heart-strengthening herbs, and folk remedies for cardiovascular diseases. Traditionally heart disease was not seen as a result of poor nutrition, too much stress or lack of exercise, but reflected an imbalance of the heart’s emotional and spiritual energies. Plants and folk remedies used as traditional heart medicine works on the mental and spiritual levels to help make the heart happy again. Storl offers new ways of looking at heart disease by recognizing how integral the heart is to our entire being.
Simon and Schuster
Eat, Poop, Die. How Animals Make Our World
Joe Roman
From the volcanoes of Iceland to the tropical waters of Hawaii, the great plains of the American heartland, and beyond, Eat, Poop, Die takes readers on an exhilarating and enlightening global adventure, revealing the remarkable ways in which the most basic biological activities of animals make and remake the world-and how a deeper understanding of these cycles provides us with opportunities to undo the environmental damage humanity has wrought on the planet we call home.
Profile Books
Filterworld. How Algorithms Flattened Culture
Kyle Chayka
In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions arise: What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet?
Penguin