Dear friends and readers,
I’m pleased to announce that a young reader’s edition of my 2001 book, The Botany of Desire, is being published today.
Beautifully adapted by Richie Chevet, who adapted The Omnivore’s Dilemma in 2009, The Botany of Desire tells the story of four plants whose destinies are linked to ours: the apple, the tulip, coffee, and the potato. It’s a book about co-evolution, natural history, and the powerful human desire that shape the natural world. My premise is that the domesticated plants that we think we manipulate and control to serve us are in fact manipulating us with their ingenious chemistries, beauty, flavors and nutrients; we work for them as much as they work for us. The new edition is aimed at readers between ten and fifteen. Please check it out, especially if you know someone in that age range interested in plants, evolution, natural history or food.
The other news around here is that May 15 will mark the five-year anniversary of my 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind.
It’s hard to believe five years has passed, because I feel I’m still living in the wake of that book’s publication. So much has happened since then! Psychedelic research has proliferated, and begun to fulfill the promise I reported on in the book. As a result, public opinion about psychedelics has shifted dramatically—from being perceived as dangerous counterculture drugs to being recognized as medicines with the potential to heal a range of mental disorders, from depression and addiction to obsessive compulsive disorder and PTSD. I notice that people have also become much more open in talking about their own experiences with psychedelics, good and bad, and there is a new openness to the idea these remarkable substances could make an important contribution to peoples’ well-being, regardless of whether or not they are ill. In the years since How to Change Your Mind was published, at least a dozen new psychedelic research centers have popped up at universities, including one I co-founded at Berkeley: The Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. The so-called “renaissance” in psychedelics is largely being driven by the results of research, but I’m pleased (and still surprised!) to have written a book (and then helped make a Netflix series based on it) that played a role in igniting the public conversation about psychedelics now underway.
That’s all for now. Let me know what you think and thanks for listening.
Sincerely,
When will you be giving Mind the YA graphic nonfiction treatment?