This Is Your Mind On Plants

Reviews

Pollan is always an entertaining writer, and a deep thinker with a light touch ... it's a trip - engrossing, eye-opening, mind altering. This fascinating insight into our relationship with mind-altering plants weaves personal experimentation with cultural history ... Pollan is the perfect guide through this sometimes controversial territory; curious, careful and, as his book progresses, increasingly open minded. Expert storytelling ... Pollan masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways. Brilliant, compulsively readable ... Pollan's storytelling is deft, forthright and fascinating. Like it or not, we are undergoing a drugs revolution ... thankfully Pollan is here to guide us through this putative challenge ... [this] relatable, middle class New York plant fancier might be the ideal standard bearer for today's calmer, more scientific approach to the subject. Pollan's intertwining of reportage, citizen science and historical scholarship is a delightful and informative read ... [he] has a rational optimism that might tempt even the most sober and sceptical to try to broaden their horizons. Pollan is a gentle, generous writer. Michael Pollan weaves tales of drug experimentation into a historical account of our long relationship with them. This Is Your Mind on Plants is witty, entertaining and polite, but it is not trivial. Subtly but assuredly, Pollan argues that which plants (and fungi) we are allowed and how depends, consciously or otherwise, on the interests of power. The descriptions of London's coffee house culture and Honoré de Balzac's barbarous habit of ingesting dry coffee grounds to fuel all-night scribbling sessions are worth the book's price alone ... The book is really about the relation between each plant and the humans who consume it, tackled in a non-judgmental and objective way that seeks to dispel the ignorance, prejudice and demonisation they attract. Fascinating and occasionally terrifying ... His opium chapter is mesmerising. A tour around three substances: caffeine, mescaline and opium. The first is legal, the others remain mostly illegal. Pollan offers us rich historical contexts for them that are often surprising. Every now and then to be put in touch with what really matters - what could be more important than that? Expand reviews