The author’s personal journey is a moving one. He is honest and vulnerable about his own struggles with addiction, depression, and existential angst. He presents insights from his meetings and time spent with shamans, healers, and other psychedelic explorers. The book raises important questions about the nature of reality, the purpose of life, and the future of our planet.
The author is a gifted storyteller and a sharp observer of the world around him.

I was recommended this book because of the nature of the subject it discusses, mainly psychedelics. After reading it I was impressed by Daniels knowledge about psychedelics, clearly a subject he has frequented from a young age and his indoctrination into intellectual studies has no doubt enhanced his awareness of the subjects mentioned in the book. I did however feel the book had a feel to it which revolved around a purely disconnected perspective. Perhaps, at least for me, the book felt like it was a play on words, an ensemble on poetics and intellectualism rather than on the bare foundations of psychedelic experience. I felt like Daniel may have chosen to maintain his identity within this book to a degree that his personal experiences took center stage, I wouldn't say it's an egotistical piece of work but it feels like he is selling his own cultural, social and intellectual heritage as apposed to selling the shamanic journey. He talks about his apartment, his father, his upbringing, his affluence and education and I feel the disconnection from this and the actual subject could have been more pronounced. It seems at times you are accompanying him through a book which focuses more on his memories and on his personal preferences rather than the separate unbiased perspective of the realms of psychedelic experience and shamanism. I guess you have to take into account this is a book about him and his experiences but you also expect to learn more about shamanism and about psychedelics and I feel the book weighs heavily towards his own identity, memories and experiences rather than delving deeper into the subjects he attempts to discuss. Don't get me wrong, it's a good book and Daniels use of language and context often appeals and leaves you wanting more, however, there is alot more I'd personally expect from a book of this nature.

Intriguing history of psychedelics throughout history including many substances I’d never heard of and how they have been used by indigenous tribes. It also includes many recommendations for other works on the topic and real experiences by the writer. A must read for anyone curious about psychedelic exploration.

Though Daniel Pinchbeck’s name will doubtless gain familiarity with the publication of this book, heretofore he has been known mostly to the younger literary cognoscenti who comprise the target audience for OPEN CITY, the literary magazine he began with the late fiction writer Rob Bingham. Since Bingham’s untimely death from a heroin overdose in 2000, Pinchbeck has continued OPEN CITY, publishing, among others, poet/musician David Berman. But his new book represents a personal quest that at first he found vaguely embarrassing even to talk about. For BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD delves deeply and seriously into the use of psychedelic drugs, drawing on one of the loftiest heroes of 20th century thought, Walter Benjamin, as a major influence in its attempt to achieve what the German thinker called “profane illumination.” And though the book aims for nothing less than spiritual penetration into the heart of both light and darkness, psychedelic drugs themselves have not only been considered “so frightening and dangerous that possession of them is punished by long prison sentences,” as the author reminds us, but they have also increasingly acquired a taint of the jejune, if not the downright adolescent.

“Most of my friends dismissed my new enthusiasm,” Pinchbeck writes of his initial forays into chemical hallucinatory experience, which were supplemented by his increasingly intense study of shamanic cultures. “Psychedelic drugs were weird and childish, something you did in high school or college and got over.... You tried them a bunch of times, had some freaky trips, then moved on to the adult lubricators of social interaction—booze, coke, Valium, pot, heroin.” While Pinchbeck’s friend Bingham isn’t mentioned in this part of the book, there’s more than a little ominous truth of observation in the writer’s regretful comment that in his circles, “heroin, above all, was the downtown hipster intoxicant of choice.... Over a decade, I knew at least a half dozen people—bright, artistic, confused—who died from overdoses. Compared to these hipster intoxicants, mushrooms and LSD were seen as silly, somehow regressive, or weak.”

By contrast, Pinchbeck implies, antidepressants fit our culture’s current worship of the aggressive, decisive, Type A personality that has so often succeeded everywhere from Pennsylvania Avenue to Wall Street to Hollywood. From his point of view, Baby Boomers and the members of Generations X and Y aren’t terribly different from the older, substance-befuddled, status-obsessed generations that preceded them: There’s little distinction, finally, between the heroin-dabbling, greedy corporate expatriates in Bingham’s two books, PURE SLAUGHTER VALUE and LIGHTNING ON THE SUN, and the characters found in the works of John Cheever, John Updike and, more recently, Rick Moody, who creates memorable characters from both age brackets in works like THE ICE STORM.

Pinchbeck’s own book is elegantly structured, kaleidoscoping between personal narrative, scientific research and cultural history. While the latter two are presented in scrupulous and carefully delineated fashion, the chronicles of Pinchbeck’s own experiences with psychedelics and the places he traveled to find them are unsparing in their details of the physical rigors involved. These drugs do not taste good and wreak a certain amount of havoc on the digestive system; adult-sized Pampers are sometimes involved.

Visionary states of any kind are difficult to describe and apprehend, as reading authors from St. John of the Cross to Rimbaud to Ken Kesey and Carlos Castaneda will prove. But Pinchbeck offers marvelous—though not overstated—descriptions of context in which everything makes sense, even though some of the psychedelic journeys he takes are terrifying. Perhaps not coincidentally, the bad trips largely result from his experiments with manmade—as opposed to plant-based—chemicals, many of them consisting, metaphorically enough, of isolated molecules. And for the most part, these frightening, fracturing and too often lonely experiences take place not in South America or Africa but close to home, which for Pinchbeck is New York City. Even the closest circle of urban or suburban friends can’t approximate the genuinely tribal groups Pinchbeck finds, for example, in the South American rain forest, groups who share an endogenous cultural history dating back at least a couple of millennia.

Yet doesn’t advocate the use of any drug; Pinchbeck believes that his visions, and the insights gained therefrom, can be achieved by other means. As Benjamin wrote, “The reader, the thinker, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. Not to mention the most terrible drug—ourselves—which we take in solitude.” In the end, BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD advocates a new way of seeing the world and all of its levels of intelligence, one rendered not only with eloquence, but also with an admirable, fully earned sincerity.

For more information on Pinchbeck’s book, visit www.breakingopenthehead.com.

(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE / Village Voice Media)