Book Review - Tibetan Peach Pie

This book contains a collection of stories about the American icon and bestselling novelist Tom Robbins. Having spent the past few years reading through Robbins' fictive works, I was excited when I heard that he was releasing a somewhat-less-fictive account of his life in autobiographical/anecdotal form.

Fortunately, I was not let down! This book has some great stories about what it was like to grow up in the first half of the 20th century, just a few hours away from where I was born and raised. For those unfamiliar with Robbins' prior works, they can be described as intellectual, hilarious, confusing, psychedelic, weird, wild, philosophical, and unusual tales that include outrageous characters like a hitchhiking cowgirl with enormous thumbs, a conscious and mobile can of beans, and a former football star turned drug dealer who stumbles upon and infiltrates a group of Catholic monks working as hired assassins for the Vatican.

Robbins' own life, detailed in these pages, is oddly similar to some of the more eye-opening portions of the his novels. He weaves together the most entertaining accounts of his life, including his boyhood and adolescence in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, all the way through to his globe-trotting adventures and wicked events from his adult life.

If you have read any Robbins, be it Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, or my personal favorite, Still Life with Woodpecker, you owe it to yourself to check out Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life. Even folks who aren't privy to Robbins' former works would love this set of raucous tales. I sincerely enjoyed getting a sneak peak into this literary legend's life, and I am confident that you will too.

4/5 stars. 384 pages.

Book Review - The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

I had been interested in reading this book since it was published in 2006, which was around the time that I was consuming a lot of atheistic and scientific materialist content from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. I imagine that if I had read the book back then, I would have found it more entertaining, and I wanted to like it more than I did—but I couldn't.

The book is incredibly tedious and repetitive, and runs out of steam fairly quickly. I will admit that it did make me chuckle a few times in the beginning, but as I read further into the book I found myself being frustrated and bored.

The basic idea behind the book is that it is the gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the sarcastic equivalent of God, or the creator of our universe. It is meant to be a humorous attack on religious and non-scientific thinking, and I imagine it would appeal to scientific materialists and atheists alike. However, that line of thinking no longer resonates with me, and I ended up disliking the book almost entirely.

I wouldn't really recommend that anyone read this book. If you're interested, go for it, but don't expect anything that clever or funny. I did have that sort of expectation, and was severely let down and felt like I wasted the time I spent reading it.

2/5 stars. 169 pages.

Book Review - Manna by Marshall Brain

Marshall Brain (founder of HowStuffWorks) and his novel Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future were recently featured on KMO's C-Realm Podcast. In episode 457: Techno Extortion, KMO and Brain talk about the book as well as the United States' current trajectory with regard to jobs, automation, profitability, and societal well-being. I was intrigued by the conversation and decided to read Manna. Although the book is available for free at the above link, you can also purchase the Kindle version for $0.99, which is what I did.

Manna shows us two very different worlds. Each is possible for us to create (or find ourselves in) from the current world we live in. In the first world, robots begin eliminating human jobs in places like retail stores, fast food restaurants, construction sites, and transportation. The key technology that fuels this is inexpensive computer vision systems, and more than half of the jobs in the United States are eliminated. Tasks like restocking shelves, cleaning bathrooms, and taking out the trash are dictated by a management software called "Manna" that speaks through an earpiece each employee wears while on the job. All human managers are eventually replaced by this software. Without getting too much into detail about this world, it could be described as dystopian, and it certainly seems plausible to me, especially because I have experience working in similar jobs. I could definitely see how the management team could be stripped from the job and replaced by a cheaper, more efficient, less forgiving computer system.

The second world is more of a utopian society, where robots are not in control of the humans. Instead, the humans control the robots and use them to make life easier. People living in this world must agree with the following core principles of that society:

1. Everyone is equal.
2. Everything is reused.
3. Nothing is anonymous.
4. Nothing is owned.
5. Tell the truth.
6. Do no harm.
7. Obey the rules.
8. Live your life.
9. Better and better.

There are drastic differences in economics, transparency, energy usage, ownership, honesty, and life quality between the two worlds. It certainly seems to me like we are headed more in the direction of the dystopian world rather than the utopian world, but in the book's Postscript, Brain mentions that the utopian world is still a possibility for us to manifest.

I enjoyed the book. It's a very quick read, and it is thought-provoking. The writing left a little to be desired, because it seemed a bit over-simplified and repetitive to me. I've tried my best to not give away too much of the plot in this review, because there isn't much plot or character development to find in the book itself. I would definitely suggest this book though, because I imagine that it would be eye-opening for the average person. For me, it painted a stark contrast between the two different roads our global society could take, and highlighted a lot of the current issues that we face.

4/5 Stars. 79 pages.  

Book Review - Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal by Tom Shroder

I originally discovered this (then-unpublished) book in an email from MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) that was requesting support for the Legalizing Psychedelic Therapy campaign on Indiegogo. Being a supporter of MAPS' efforts and intrigued by the book's premise, I jumped on the opportunity to donate right away.

The book came in the mail just before I had the opportunity to see author Tom Shroder and one of the main characters in the book, Nicholas Blackston, speak at the 2014 Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics conference in New York City. I was moved by their presentation and looked forward to reading the book, although I wasn't able to make time to read it until this month.

Shroder is an editor at The Washington Post Magazine, an acclaimed journalist, and the author of Old Souls. As a fellow writer, I look up to him although I was previously unfamiliar with his work prior to this book. Acid Test weaves several non-fiction narratives together into a page-turner tale that includes a fairly in-depth history of psychedelic research, explores some of the various characters in the psychedelic community, and describes the current state of psychedelic research with a focus on MDMA-(also known by its street name "Ecstasy") assisted psychotherapeutic treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

I was familiar with many of the characters in the book. These include (but are not limited to) Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, Michael Mithoefer, a former emergency room physician-turned psychiatrist at the forefront of modern psychedelic therapy, Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD in 1938, and Stanislav Grof, the creator of Holotropic Breathwork therapy. However, I wasn't familiar with the story of former Marine Nicholas Blackston.

Before I began the book, I thought I would be more interested in the descriptions of psychedelic research and its various characters, but as I continued to read on and on, the story that really pulled me in and kept me coming back was Blackston's. As a former Marine, Blackston witnessed horrors in war that most of us cannot fathom, and when he returned stateside he was tortured from the inside-out by reoccurring nightmares, uncontrollable flashback hallucinations, a temper with an increasingly short fuse, and physical pain from shrapnel wounds acquired during his combat missions.

Blackston ended up being one of the lucky ones, however. Compared to the majority of our returned military personnel who are currently suffering tremendously from PTSD, he was fortunate enough to seek and receive help from MDMA-assisted psychotherapy and has experienced many positive results from his treatment. Although his PTSD is not completely gone, it is greatly diminished due to the healing power of MDMA and the wisdom of his experienced therapeutic guides. Acid Test argues that our veterans deserve the right to receive reliable and effective treatment, rather than the typical, dangerous, and fruitless hodgepodge of pharmaceutical drugs that they receive from traditional sources of help like the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

MAPS is on track to reach its goal of legalizing MDMA by 2021, and books like Acid Test go a long way toward supporting that effort. As a person who is well-educated on the psychedelic research side of the book, I can vouch that it is well-researched and presented in an easy-to-understand manner. The personal stories that make up the book make for a fascinating and personal reading experience, and I hope that the message continues to reach as many people as possible.

5/5 stars. 426 pages.