Buy Breaking Open the Head - by Daniel Pinchbeck (Paperback) in United States - Cartnear.com

Breaking Open the Head - by Daniel Pinchbeck (Paperback)

CTNR609017 09780767907439 CTNR609017

carol & frank

carol & frank
2025-09-19 USD 16.71

$ 16.71 $ 17.59

Item Added to Cart

*Product availability is subject to suppliers inventory

Breaking Open the Head - by  Daniel Pinchbeck (Paperback)
SHIPPING ALL OVER UNITED STATES
Breaking Open the Head - by  Daniel Pinchbeck (Paperback)
100% MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
Breaking Open the Head - by  Daniel Pinchbeck (Paperback)
EASY 30 DAYSRETURNS & REFUNDS
Breaking Open the Head - by  Daniel Pinchbeck (Paperback)
24/7 CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Breaking Open the Head - by  Daniel Pinchbeck (Paperback)
TRUSTED AND SAFE WEBSITE
Breaking Open the Head - by  Daniel Pinchbeck (Paperback)
100% SECURE CHECKOUT
Number of Pages: 336
Genre: Social Science
Sub-Genre: General
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
Age Range: Adult
Author: Daniel Pinchbeck
Language: English



Book Synopsis



A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience.

While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe.

Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival.

Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.



Review Quotes




"Grippingly dramatic, powerfully moving, this is a classic of the literature of ecstasy."
--Booklist (starred review)

"In his reporting, [Pinchbeck] manages to walk a difficult tonal tightrope, balancing his skepticism with a desire to be transformed. He thoughtfully serveys the literature about psychedelic drugs, but the most exhilirating and illuminating sections are the descriptions of drug taking...Pinchbeck's earnest, engaged and winning matter carry the book."
--Publishers Weekly

"I much admire Breaking Open the Head for being the account of an authentic quest for enlightenment in jungles, up rivers, in deserts, and hardest of all to access, the human mind and heart via one of the oldest thoroughfares on earth, mind-expanding drugs. This is a serious and illuminating journey."
--Paul Theroux



About the Author



DANIEL PINCHBECK is a founding editor of Open City, and he has written for such publications as Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, and The Village Voice, where sections of his book have previously appeared.

Related Products

See More

You May Also Like

See More