Tag: non-fiction
-
The Doors of Perception, Huxley (1954)
Writing coherently about a psychedelic experience is not easy. Believe me, I’ve tried. The result is usually a mix of bad poetry and worse speechifying. (Evaluated under conditions of conventional perception, of course; if the doors of perception were cleansed, even claptrap appears as it truly is, infinitely adorable.) Huxley far surpasses coherence in Doors…
-
The Practice of the Wild, Snyder (1990)
The ideas contained within Practice of the Wild may be the only ideas powerful enough to stave off the looming ecological and political apocalypses of the twenty-first century. I acknowledge the grandiosity of this statement. My only defense is that the ideas in this book are not the work of one man. They are the…
-
The Trouble with Physics, Smolin (2006)
If Lee Smolin is right, the first half ofThe Trouble with Physics is destined to be forgotten. A decade or two hence, string theory may feel like a fever dream—a kaleidoscopic rush of ideas, some brilliant, some absurd, but the whole ultimately incoherent. If that’s the case, then the details of string theory will become…