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Recent Reviews
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Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography
by Huston Smith, with Jeffery Paine
Publisher:
HarperCollins 
Year:
2009 
Reviewed by Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D.
10/29/2009

Huston Smith tracks his nearly ninety-year journey, which he divides into a horizontal, secular dimension and a vertical, sacred dimension. The first is a feet-on-the-ground report of adventures on earth; the second reports on his head and heart as they explore spiritual geography and time. [ read more ]

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Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
Publisher:
Penguin/Riverside Books 
Year:
2009 
Reviewed by Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D.
10/29/2009

Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s search takes her to research anecdotes on mystical experiences and their transformation of people’s lives, unusual healing, genetics, psychedelic drugs with special emphasis on the Native American Church’s use of peyote, and the psilocybin experiments of the Roland Griffiths team at Johns Hopkins. Two odd omissions: the author cites neither Huston Smith’s Cleansing the Doors of Perception nor One Nation Under God: The Triumph of the Native American Church (co-edited by Smith and Reuben Snake), and fails to mention Ralph Hood’s Mysticism Scale and its years of use.
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Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain
by Andy Roberts
Publisher:
Marshall Cavendish 
Year:
2008 
Reviewed by Arran Frood
10/14/2009

Much has been written about Leary and his compatriots, but Albion Dreaming retains a gritty UK perspective. From the still-secret experiments conducted at Britain’s military research establishment at Porton Down, to Ronald Sandison, a doctor who opened the world’s first specialized LSD psychotherapy unit at Powick Hospital in Worcestershire in 1952, the author packs the pages with a riotous selection of well-sourced anecdotes. [ read more ]