From Publishers Weekly
Open City editor Pinchbeck's book debut is a polemic that picks up the threads that Huxley's The Doors of Perception, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and counterculture idealism left in the culture. Charting his gradual transformation from a cynical New York litterateur to psychedelic acolyte, Pinchbeck uses elements of travelogue, memoir, "entheobotany" ("the study of god-containing plants") and historical research to ask why these "doorways of the mind" have been unceremoniously sealed, sharing Walter Benjamin's melancholy about the exasperating nature of consumerism: "We live in a culture where everything tastes good but nothing satisfies." Pinchbeck travels the earth in search of spiritual awakening through tripping, from Gabon to the Nevada desert. At happenings like the Burning Man festival or a plant conference in the Ecuadorean jungle, Pinchbeck meets "modern shamans" and tells their stories as they intersect with his. In his reporting, he manages to walk a difficult tonal tightrope, balancing his skepticism with a desire to be transformed. He thoughtfully surveys the literature about psychedelic drugs, but the most exhilarating and illuminating sections are the descriptions of drug taking: he calls this visiting the "spirit world," which is "like a cosmic bureaucracy employing its own PR department, its own off-kilter sense of dream-logic and humor... constantly playing with human limitations, dangling possibilities before our puny grasps at knowledge." There's little new drug lore here, but Pinchbeck's earnest, engaged and winning manner carry the book. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this firsthand account of the world of psychedelic substances today, Village Voice and Rolling Stone writer Pinchbeck weaves elements of his personal life, including vivid descriptions of his reactions to the substances he takes, with larger topics, such as the history of psychedelic substances in the modern world and the foundations of shamanism. To aid his inquiry, he participates in visionary rituals around the world, e.g., taking iboga as part of a tribal initiation in Gabon. He also discusses key figures such as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Terence McKenna. Pinchbeck repeatedly decries the rationalism and destructiveness of Western culture and the shortsightedness of completely outlawing psychedelic substances. The book is not an extended diatribe, however. The author offers various viewpoints on how certain drugs should be used and on whether a modern, Western shamanism is possible. Pinchbeck posits a universe that may be difficult to accept, but his book will be of interest for public and academic libraries.Stephen Joseph, Butler Cty. Community Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Stop the eye-rolling--now! The words psychedelic and contemporary can be used in the same subtitle, as can contemporary and shamanism without referring to American consumer shamanism ("I took a weekend workshop") but to the real thing, practiced by the Bwiti of Africa and by Amazon brujos. Pinchbeck's startling and absorbing book flashes from German philosopher Walter Benjamin and British mind-explorer Aldous Huxley to the literature of anthropology to the politics of drug use, all while touring Gabon's outback, the lush South American jungle (six miles and several world-views away from industrialization), and the wild, evanescent culture of Burning Man in the Nevada desert. What keeps the book from being just another apologia pro wasted vita sua is the depth of Pinchbeck's personal searching. An agnostic with yearnings toward mysticism at the book's beginning, he underwent, and he documents, a genuine experience of the divine that resulted from "breaking open" the rational mind. He achieved a sophisticated vision, but one not without unease, for he encountered demons as well as gods in the otherworlds. But nothing is more demonic, he concludes, than a society whose relentless commodification blasts a short route to addiction. Grippingly dramatic, powerfully moving, this is a classic of the literature of ecstasy. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Grippingly dramatic, powerfully moving, this is a classic of the literature of ecstasy."
(starred review)
"In his reporting, [Pinchbeck] manages to walk a difficult tonal tightrope, balancing his skepticism with a desire to be transformed. He thoughtfully serveys the literature about psychedelic drugs, but the most exhilirating and illuminating sections are the descriptions of drug taking...Pinchbeck's earnest, engaged and winning matter carry the book."
Weekly
"I much admire Breaking Open the Head for being the account of an authentic quest for enlightenment in jungles, up rivers, in deserts, and hardest of all to access, the human mind and heart via one of the oldest thoroughfares on earth, mind-expanding drugs. This is a serious and illuminating journey."
--Paul Theroux
From the Hardcover edition.
Review
"Grippingly dramatic, powerfully moving, this is a classic of the literature of ecstasy."
(starred review)
"In his reporting, [Pinchbeck] manages to walk a difficult tonal tightrope, balancing his skepticism with a desire to be transformed. He thoughtfully serveys the literature about psychedelic drugs, but the most exhilirating and illuminating sections are the descriptions of drug taking...Pinchbeck's earnest, engaged and winning matter carry the book."
Weekly
"I much admire Breaking Open the Head for being the account of an authentic quest for enlightenment in jungles, up rivers, in deserts, and hardest of all to access, the human mind and heart via one of the oldest thoroughfares on earth, mind-expanding drugs. This is a serious and illuminating journey."
--Paul Theroux
From the Hardcover edition.
Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism FROM THE PUBLISHER
A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience.
While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe.
Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival.
Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of thecosmos.
Author Biography: DANIEL PINCHBECK is a founding editor of Open City, and he has written for such publications as Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, and The Village Voice, where sections of his book have previously appeared.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Open City editor Pinchbeck's book debut is a polemic that picks up the threads that Huxley's The Doors of Perception, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and counterculture idealism left in the culture. Charting his gradual transformation from a cynical New York litterateur to psychedelic acolyte, Pinchbeck uses elements of travelogue, memoir, "entheobotany" ("the study of god-containing plants") and historical research to ask why these "doorways of the mind" have been unceremoniously sealed, sharing Walter Benjamin's melancholy about the exasperating nature of consumerism: "We live in a culture where everything tastes good but nothing satisfies." Pinchbeck travels the earth in search of spiritual awakening through tripping, from Gabon to the Nevada desert. At happenings like the Burning Man festival or a plant conference in the Ecuadorean jungle, Pinchbeck meets "modern shamans" and tells their stories as they intersect with his. In his reporting, he manages to walk a difficult tonal tightrope, balancing his skepticism with a desire to be transformed. He thoughtfully surveys the literature about psychedelic drugs, but the most exhilarating and illuminating sections are the descriptions of drug taking: he calls this visiting the "spirit world," which is "like a cosmic bureaucracy employing its own PR department, its own off-kilter sense of dream-logic and humor... constantly playing with human limitations, dangling possibilities before our puny grasps at knowledge." There's little new drug lore here, but Pinchbeck's earnest, engaged and winning manner carry the book. (On sale Sept. 17) Forecast: Pinchbeck is a founding editor, along with Thomas Beller, of Open City, a kind of Paris Review for the '90s, and the son of artist Peter Pinchbeck and Beat memoirist Joyce Johnson. Portions of the book previously appeared in the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, where Pinchbeck is a contributor. Look for a few strong national reviews and solid sales, particularly among younger readers, who will turn out for the four-city tour. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
In this firsthand account of the world of psychedelic substances today, Village Voice and Rolling Stone writer Pinchbeck weaves elements of his personal life, including vivid descriptions of his reactions to the substances he takes, with larger topics, such as the history of psychedelic substances in the modern world and the foundations of shamanism. To aid his inquiry, he participates in visionary rituals around the world, e.g., taking iboga as part of a tribal initiation in Gabon. He also discusses key figures such as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Terence McKenna. Pinchbeck repeatedly decries the rationalism and destructiveness of Western culture and the shortsightedness of completely outlawing psychedelic substances. The book is not an extended diatribe, however. The author offers various viewpoints on how certain drugs should be used and on whether a modern, Western shamanism is possible. Pinchbeck posits a universe that may be difficult to accept, but his book will be of interest for public and academic libraries.-Stephen Joseph, Butler Cty. Community Coll. Lib., PA
Kirkus Reviews
A quest after the possibilities of psychedelics and a case history of one man's forays into the hands of these supernatural emissaries, from journalist and Open City founder Pinchbeck. Plagued by existential questions ("Why this life? Why anything?"), the author tries after deep meanings, abiding hopes, or, better yet, transcendence, through the agency of chemical self-discovery via those visionary catalysts psilocybin, LSD, DMT (and its evil twin DPT), iboga, and ayahuasca. Pinchbeck is appalled by our culture's faith in materialism and rationalism at the expense of intuition and ritual. He wants to tap the vestigial awareness of magical realms, the archaic beliefs embodied in the works of Shakespeare, Artaud, Walter Benjamin-the psychedelic avatars. But he is not content with someone else's experience with transcendence; he wants his own relation to the universe. Thus, he turns to the shamanic cultures for revelation of the nonordinary world beyond the tug of Western gravity. The stories Pinchbeck relates of his experiences in Gabon, Mexico, and Ecuador, worked in and around the extensive literary research he has done into psychedelia, have both an awkward comedy and the focus of a pilgrim. You can't help but smile when he tells of the Gabonese shaman trying to squirrel more money out of him, and you can't help but be impressed by the compacted memory theater of an iboga-fueled Bwiti initiation. For the DMT experience, which Pinchbeck showcases as "instant proof, beyond any doubt, of the existence of esoteric realities of a nonmaterialist Mystery worth exploring," you surely had to be there: his imagery of the trip doesn't support the fervor of his conclusions. Still, who is prepared tofault or stanch the "yearning for meaning and spiritual truth in a world that seemed devoid of both" that prompted Pinchbeck's quest? Arguable, but compelling for its insistence that there are more games in town than the Western cultural moment.
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