Home › Books › This Is Your Mind on Plants
This Is Your Mind on Plants
by
34/99
Critics' Rating Index
50/99
Readers' Rating Index
92/99
Scholars' Citation Index
98/99
Volume of Reviews
94/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs--opium, caffeine, and mescaline--and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?
Reviews
"While his previous books may have had their critics, This Is Your Mind on Plants, places Pollan, for this reviewer at least, among those science writers — James Gleick, Marcia Angell, Harold McGee, Jared Diamond and more — who demonstrate through the night of Trumpism, QAnon and the anti-vaxx movement that the flag of scientific literacy still waves in America."
"When I put the book down I felt temporarily smarter, more capable of deeper perception of myself and the world around me."
"The book's competing tendency towards gonzo journalism, however, is less successful, his feats of self-experimentation oddly anticlimactic ..."
"This Is Your Mind on Plants is an entertaining blend of memoir, history and social commentary that illustrates Pollan's ability to be both scientific and personal."
"Most of the background in Caffeine can also be found in stand-alone books on coffee or tea."
"He's not about to blow his own mind, and he doesn't want to blow the minds of readers, either."
"Pollan is the perfect guide through this sometimes controversial territory; curious, careful and, as his book progresses, increasingly open minded."
"That doesn't stop him doing it, with predictably tedious consequences, but he constructs a nice chapter all the same out of other bits of information."
"Culture shifts that encourage the curious to engage in recreational consciousness-fiddling are all well and good."
"Instead of prescribing a list of potential policy actions, he ultimately leaves the details of how we might move forward with plant-derived compounds open to interpretation."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!