At Reason magazine's website, Travis Kitchens reviews a new biography of Terence McKenna, Strange Attractor. The book is written by Graham St John.
An extract from the review:
"In the early 2000s, before YouTube became a sprawling repository of his recorded lectures (over 250), DVDs of McKenna's legendary raps could be obtained from a mail-order catalogue called Sound Photosynthesis. In my early 20s, I watched in awe as McKenna weaved a dizzying array of ideas into what seemed like genuine prophecy. As far as I was concerned, these were the oracular utterances of a modern-day seer. Humanity's survival, I came to believe, was a matter of two things: spreading the use of psychedelics as far as humanly possible, and broadcasting McKenna's message across the entire planet.
"Over the next two decades, as I became more familiar with McKenna's source material (Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, Gordon Wasson, Mircea Eliade, and Marshall McLuhan, primarily), I began to suspect that things were more complicated. As the historian Graham St. John illustrates in Strange Attractor, his delightful new biography of the man, McKenna was a 'master bullshitter'."
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