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Tripping on utopia : Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science  Cover Image Book Book

Tripping on utopia : Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science / Benjamin Breen.

Summary:

""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"-- Provided by publisher.

Record details

  • ISBN: 9781538722374 (hardcover)
  • Physical Description: x, 369 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
  • Edition: First edition.
  • Publisher: New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2024.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Subject: Bateson, Gregory, 1904-1980.
Mead, Margaret, 1901-1978.
Anthropology > Research > United States > History > 20th century.
Cold War.
Hallucinogenic drugs > Research > United States > History > 20th century.
United States > Civilization > 20th century.
Genre: Biographies.
Personal narratives.

Available copies

  • 1 of 1 copy available at Tsuga Consortium.

Holds

  • 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Show Only Available Copies
Location Call Number / Copy Notes Barcode Shelving Location Status Due Date
Cookstown Branch 154.4 Bre 31681010355915 NONFIC Available -


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