Psychonauts
Research & scholarshipThe clinical era
Two centuries of people experimenting on themselves, and what it did to medicine.
A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon
Reportage & memoirThe clinical eraHistory, culture & policy
What it is
John O'Connor retraces the 1971 expedition that took Terence and Dennis McKenna to La Chorrera, in the Colombian Amazon. Terence later wrote up the mushroom experiment they ran there in True Hallucinations, which is also on this shelf. O'Connor, a journalist who teaches at Boston College, works from decades-old field notes and new interviews, travels the same stretch of the Putumayo alongside Uitoto people, whose community witnessed the 1971 visit, and sets the episode against the region's longer history, including the damage the rubber trade did there. Library Journal called the result a blend of biography, history and travel writing. Nothing in it is evidence about what any drug does.
The record
- Author
- John O'Connor
- Published
- 2026
- Publisher
- Sourcebooks
- ISBN
- 9781464218088
- Kind
- Reportage & memoir
- Subject
- History, culture & policy
- Era
- The clinical era
- Links checked
- 20 Oct 2026, and they resolved.
Where to find it
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Related on this shelf
The Psilocybin Connection
Research & scholarshipThe clinical era
Khamsehzadeh ties mushrooms to mind and human development. Wide-ranging.
The Immortality Key
Reportage & memoirThe clinical era
Did psychedelic sacraments shape early Christianity? A classicist makes the case.
Timothy Leary
The revival
Leary's Harvard papers, before the myth. Edited and annotated by a scholar.
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