Overview
A bold and brilliant revisionistĀ takeĀ on the history of psychedelicsĀ in the twentieth century, illuminatingĀ how a culture of experimental drugs shaped the Cold War and the birth of Silicon Valley.
"It was not the Baby BoomersĀ who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents."
Far from the repressedĀ traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated.Ā 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 anthropologistsāand star-crossed loversāMargaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their lifeās missionĀ to reshape humanityĀ through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocksĀ an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, andĀ the founders of the Information Age.
As we follow Mead and Batesonās fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New GuineaĀ to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story forĀ psychedelic science emerges.
This book title, Tripping on Utopia (Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science), ISBN: 9781538722374, by Benjamin Breen, published by Grand Central Publishing (January 16, 2024) is available in hardcover. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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