Título: This Is Your Mind on Plants
Autor: Michael Pollan
Sinopse: From #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos.
Of all the things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber—surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime?
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan 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?
In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively—as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.
Contexto da obra
Como livro em inglês, esta obra costuma ganhar também uma camada própria de interesse editorial e linguístico. “This Is Your Mind on Plants”, de Michael Pollan, publicado pela editora Random House Large Print, em 2021 e com 384 páginas, integra a categoria Livros em Inglês. Por isso, o interesse da obra tende a se ampliar quando o leitor considera também a relação com a língua em que ela circula.
Editora: Random House Large Print
Páginas: 384
Ano: 2021-07-27
Edição: Large type / Large print
Linguagem: en
ISBN: 0593414217
ISBN13: 9780593414217
Sobre a editora
Os livros da editora Random House Large Print oferecem uma experiência de leitura marcada por narrativas que exploram conflitos humanos intensos, muitas vezes ambientados em cenários contemporâneos ou históricos ricos em detalhes. O catálogo privilegia histórias com personagens complexos, que enfrentam dilemas pessoais, familiares ou sociais, em contextos que vão de dramas familiares a thrillers policiais e narrativas de suspense. O tom dessas obras varia entre o emocionalmente denso e o envolvente, com ritmo que pode ser tanto tenso quanto contemplativo, dependendo do foco da trama. A diversidade do catálogo inclui tanto romances que exploram relações e segredos quanto thrillers que mantêm a tensão até o final.
