Tripping on Utopia
25 April 2024Imprint: Footnote Press
Synopsis
'It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents.'
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. American physician John C....
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. American physician John C....
Details
25 April 2024384 pages
9781804441091Imprint: Footnote Press
Reviews
A brilliant and original history of the chemical dreamscape of American democracy...Tripping on Utopia resurrects the promise, dangers, and sheer weirdness of one of the twentieth century's unsung frontiers of discovery: the quest to change the world by altering humans' perception of it.Charles King, author of Gods of the Upper Air and Midnight at the Pera Palace
A marvel of scholarship and impossible to put down.Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture
In this strikingly original new history of psychedelic science, Benjamin Breen focuses on its origins in the interwar years alongside the expansive utopian projects of that era: anthropologists studying how cultures change, cybernetic dreams of reprogramming the brain, and the fascination with other wonder drugs such as hormones, truth serums and tranquillisers. The result is a thrilling history of ideas...narrated with infectious energy and enthusiasm.Mike Jay, author or Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind
Breen is an engaging writer invigorated by his topic, and to synthesize so much information is an accomplishmentNew York Times