Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science

Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science - Hardcover

$30.00
$30.00
Skip to product information
Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science
  • Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science
Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science - Hardcover

Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science - Hardcover

by Benjamin Breen
$30.00
$30.00

Book Overview

A Los Angeles Times Bestseller

One of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2024

A bold and brilliant revisionist take on the history of psychedelics in the twentieth century, illuminating how a culture of experimental drugs shaped the Cold War and the birth of Silicon Valley.

"Brilliant and original."―Charles King, author of Gods of the Upper Air and Midnight at the Pera Palace

"It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents."

Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth.

At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists--and star-crossed lovers--Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life's mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure.

Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, and the founders of the Information Age. As we follow Mead and Bateson's fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.

"This masterpiece of storytelling is underpinned by impeccable research and extraordinary material that will have you questioning everything you think you know about America's history of psychedelic drug use." --Lindsey Fitzharris, New York Times bestselling author of The Facemaker
ISBN9781538722374
Author Benjamin Breen
PublisherGrand Central Publishing
GenreBiography, History, and Education
FormatHardcover
PublishedJanuary 2024
LanguageENG- English
Pages384
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Biography & Autobiography History Nonfiction Science

1% fer Each of the Seven Seas

Every purchase sends 7% of our profits to The Ocean Cleanup. No fine print, no opt-in — just how we sail.

Whoever Ye Be, Welcome Aboard

Queer lit, music, art, philosophy, fiction — stories for every kind of soul. Come as ye are, matey.

You may also like