Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book provides a good overview of reflections of the late Terence McKenna, a celebrated icon of the contemporary psychedelic scene and discussion, comparable perhaps with Timothy Leary in the 1960's. For the curious reader, "Food of the Gods" offers a rich insight into his thought and its appeal. But that appeal turns out to be rather narrow and limited, unfortunately. Like Leary, McKenna commanded considerable attention, reaching a wide audience and achieving some degree of celebrity. But as reflected in the pages of this book, his analysis and views turn out to be surprisingly (I would even say disappointingly) weak, and fatally biased, with no solid substance. I am sure McKenna must have been a very nice man from what people say, and I don't necessarily suspect he was a dishonest person. Nor is he a bad writer. But for a subject as interesting as the human impact of hallucinogenic fungi, the discussion McKenna offers here leaves a lot to be desired. He tends to jump precipitously to his conclusions, and tries to support his arguments by speculation, often idle in nature, and rarely qualified with any semblance of scholarly rigor. This is surprising (and again, disappointing) because he is apparently well educated. For example, the glare of Lamarck's error is blinding in McKenna's speculations that psilocybin mushrooms may have catalyzed the very evolution of our species from its hominid ancestry. This is a good example of the kind of thought that seems to have excited so many readers of McKenna's works. But if you have a minimally sound understanding of the idea of natural selection, it's actually a little bit insulting to your intelligence (not that I think he meant it to be). McKenna's thesis of the extraterrestrial origin of Stropharia cubensis gleefully throws any and all pretense of informed reason to the wind, and I'm sure that's a lot of fun--but only in a cartoony, conceptually childish way. Readers seeking a more balanced understanding about psilocybin mushrooms will scratch their heads at how oblivious McKenna seems to findings from science. To me his writings recall "scientific creationists" and their style of argument. In fact, along these lines, one of the worst flaws in this book is its stifling, overbearing, disaffecting ideological rigidity. It is almost like what one sometimes sees in "creationism" but of opposite, left-wing rather than right-wing, character. The more different, the more the same? This is hokey, corny stuff, and actually not interesting, unless you are really into, well, overt propaganda really, about the "partnership" society of prehistory, and the "dominator" culture, and ... it just goes off into this sort of hambone rhetorical bait for anyone who will snap at it. Here, a lot of fashionable, widely circulating fairy tales about prehistory and pre-industrialized culture are installed at the foundation, where only a better informed theoretical perspective could serve. It's Rousseau's "noble savage" all over again, with PC retooling. (From my perspective, notions that other peoples are better or worse than we are, especially if they are really really different from us, probably tend to distort our image, and capacity for humane understanding, of both them and ourselves, sooner or later). One seeks in vain for a connection of any significance in this book to the prior works of pioneers such as Huxley, Alan Watts, Huston Smith, and R. Gordon Wasson, whose comments about the personal power and impact of their experiences with psilocybin mushrooms and/or similar agents are so insightful. McKenna actually challenges Wasson's thesis about Soma, suggesting it was not Amanita muscaria but ... you guessed it ... Stropharia cubensis. And true to form, he offers nothing amounting to evidence, only a chain of poorly reasoned supposition and speculations--a far cry from the exhaustive research and painstaking studies upon which Wasson based his theory. McKenna argues his ideas with all the passion he can muster, and perhaps this explains part of his appeal for some readers, especially if they share in his brand of polarized politics (note the unbridled enthusiasm on parade in many of the reviews posted here). So if firing your imagination with a lot of wild and wooly psychedelic surmises is your cup of tea, you will perhaps find this book entertaining. It's really a dalliance in mental self-stimulation for anyone whose tastes it appeals to. If a sound, well-informed perspective about a subject as important and interesting as ethnobotany is what you seek, well, this book is still good in that you can get a clear, detailed picture of the Terence McKenna phenomenon, and what it represents as a body of ideas or thought, what it is all about, the better for you to be able to evaluate its relative merits. Apart from that, this is essentially an uninteresting book on a fascinating subject. I would prefer to bear happier tidings, but "Food of the Gods" really fails to deliver a discussion worthy of the visionary promise of personal experiences with psilocybin mushrooms, compelling and glittering as that promise is. But don't take my word for it, read the book and see for yourself what you think. The good news is, if the king within it looks naked, you need not think there is anything wrong with you, even if you don't hear others around you mentioning this surprising fact. (BTW, McKenna's does have some good essays such as "Wasson's Literary Precursors" where his scholarship and writing can shine without being muddled by a lot of prank speculation, but they are not to be found in this book.)