Drugs can unlock the doors of perception or the gates of hell. Most of the time, depending on the company you keep, they're viewed in one extreme or the other. But in juxtaposing tales of swooping, ecstatic highs and puking, paranoid lows, the book White Rabbit: A Psychedelic Reader offers something unique - drug culture with a balanced point of view. The usual suspects - Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Leary, and William Burroughs - are all here, as well as a few faces you wouldn't expect at this kind of a party. What's that Charles Dickens character toking on anyway? And could those nice ladies extolling the virtues of opium be Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Florence Nightingale?
This collection of stories is a tribute to the will to trip, on everything from vines to cough syrup to blood. There are the mystical, religious insights from the Fang people in Africa, as well as morphine-pricked moments of desperation with Nelson Algren's "Man with the Golden Arm." The description of Soma from the Rig Veda is so inspired and rapturous, it'll make you long for a rabbit hole of your own to crawl down. Then De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" comes along - "agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered" - and you think again.
Packing 38 stories, White Rabbit offers a South American cartel's worth of shooting, snorting, swallowing, and smoking. The only shortcoming is that in the editors' enthusiasm to cram together as much material as possible, they've neglected to include full explanations of when and why many of the stories were written. There are short author bios at the back of the book, but they're not complete enough to prevent you from feeling like a synapse or two has been skipped over.
Still, White Rabbit, like the mind alterers that serve as its inspiration, is fascinating, seductive, and difficult to shake from your brain.
White Rabbit: A Psychedelic Reader, edited by John Miller and Randall Koral: US$12.95. Chronicle Books: +1 (415) 777 7240, fax +1 (415) 777 8877.
STREET CRED
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What Kind of Nation Will We Be?
The Will to Trip
They Do Make 'Em Like They Used To
