Those first few pages set up the theme of Net of Being: while Alex’s first book, Sacred Mirrors, largely focused on our shared but unique spiritual journeys as individuals, this book celebrates such paths within communities.
Both of Alex’s previous art books included works dedicated to the topics of physical and spiritual love, depicting how such divine bonding can lead to the incarnation of new human forms. Net of Being continues these strong melodies, showcasing a bounty of recent paintings, [...] as well as older works, including portraits from the late 1980s of Alex and his soul mate Allyson. [ read more ]
With illustrations by Janjetov and brain-melting color by Beltran, The Technopriests is an eye-popping visual feast. Jodorowsky has been quoted as saying, “I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs”. The same would seem to be true of his work in comics. Indeed, in collaboration with Janjetov and Beltran, he brings worlds to life that would be impossible to film, even with today’s CGI wizardry. [ read more ]
Once again, it’s the interaction between the writing and the illustration that provides such a lush and unique means of expressing the psychedelic experience. To bring the world of Rogan Gosh to life, artist Brendan McCarthy mined his own childhood obsession with the Amar Chitra Katha tradition of Indian comic books—cross-wiring that with the electric offspring of punk-rock pop art to produce a lurching, spiral play of hyper-color lotuses, sitar-rayguns, corridors of endless uncertainty, ashrams of the absolute, and the dead-end sprawl of South London. [ read more ]
Don’t let the leopard-print short-shorts fool you! Four-part comic book miniseries Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery (reprinted at long last in a handsome hardcover “deluxe” edition) is one of the most sophisticated representations of a drug trip ever written or drawn. [...] At the same time in an alternate reality, an unnamed rock singer is dying of a drug overdose in the rain. He’s taken everything in the house, including quite a bit of LSD, and he’s talking on a mobile phone to the unseen voice on the other end of a suicide prevention hotline. All he wants to talk about are comic books. [ read more ]
High Price is an autobiography of research scientist and drug expert Carl Hart, Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, and Director of the Residential Studies and Methamphetamine Research Laboratories at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The problems Hart describes in his upbringing and environment spring mainly from racism and poverty, often erroneously attributed to drugs. A much larger role then the effects of any drugs were the effect of the criminal justice system… [ read more ]
Smoke Signals is a brilliant chronicle of the insanity of US drug policy, later foisted on the rest of the world, through the example of the healing green bud. A cover blurb from Douglas Brinkely suggests, “Every American should read this landmark book!”, and he is right. [ read more ]
One would expect that there’d be a lot to say about any centenarian, and this is even more the case with an individual as exceptional and influential as Albert Hofmann. Since Albert Hofmann’s story began 107 years ago, Dieter and Lucius then take us back in time, setting the stage by describing the beginnings of the Modern Era, when the industrial revolution, capitalism, and technological innovations were booming. [ read more ]
In this concise and persuasive book, Kirsch debunks what he calls the myth of antidepressants and the brain chemistry imbalance theory of depression. Kirsch. is [...] an expert on placebo effects. Kirsch and colleagues found that antidepressants worked only very slightly better for treating depression than placebos did. [ read more ]
What would you say to the possibility of a riveting, yet thoroughly academic, nonfiction page-turner? Stephan V. Beyer’s tour de force, Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, is nothing less! It is when talking about his teachers that Beyer is most revealed as a humble and thoughtful human being. [ read more ]
There are certain books that, once read, alter one’s mind permanently. This is such a book. Naïve readers and patriots beware: You will never think about the world in the same way after you have read just the first two chapters of American War Machine. The book’s major thesis, simply put, is that: “US backdoor covert foreign policy has been the largest single cause of the illicit drugs flooding the world today.” [ read more ]