This program has SOLD OUT. To join the wait list, email: [email protected]After a successful launch of the Masters Series last summer, join author André Bernard, Vice President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, for a second season of conversations with literary masters. On August 30, Bernard speaks with author, educator, and activist, Michael Pollan.
For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. He is the author of nine books, six of which have been New York Times bestsellers. His most recent publication, This is Your Mind on Plants (2021), blends history, science, and memoir to explore three plant-based drugs: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.
Of all the things provided by plants—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber—surely the most curious is their capacity to change our consciousness. This is Your Mind on Plants examines cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming, (or explicitly trying not to consume them), and reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings? Pollan’s book explores these plants from several very different angles and contexts—including first-person experience—to shine a fresh light on a subject that is often treated reductively as a drug, whether licit or illicit.
Event Venue
2 Plunkett St, Lenox, MA, United States, Massachusetts 01240
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