The Renaissance High Garden
Psychedelics, Gardens and Memory in the Writings of Michael Pollan
Unquestionably, the highest selling book to emerge from the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’ is Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind (2018)—a tome mapping out its cluster of research and therapeutic activities. I must confess, having written about hundreds of drug-related books, I have never put pen to paper about this one—until now.
I’ve spent my time exploring crags and inlets, spending a few months or years in different areas of the psychedelic landscape, minutely charting its undulations. A classic work of American reportage, How To Change Your Mind is an all-expenses-paid cruise around the coast, stopping off in ports here and there to interview the local tribal elders, trying their delicacies, and developing a guidebook for the folk back home.
Without doubt, this approach is its strength. Pollan’s lucid writing is not simply accessible, in a way that scientific journal writing is not, it is also thoughtful and gently slips …