Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000
- ISBN-10
- 0743230108
- ISBN-13
- 9780743230100
- Series
- Can't Find My Way Home
- Category
- Social Science / Sociology / General
- Pages
- 545
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2004
- Publisher
- Simon & Schuster
- Author
- Martin Torgoff
Description
Can't Find My Way Home is a history of illicit drug use in America in the second half of the twentieth century and a personal journey through the drug experience. It's the remarkable story of how America got high, the epic tale of how the American Century transformed into the Great Stoned Age.
Martin Torgoff begins with the avant-garde worlds of bebop jazz and the emerging Beat writers, who embraced the consciousness-altering properties of marijuana and other underground drugs. These musicians and writers midwifed the age of marijuana in the 1960s even as Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) discovered the power of LSD, ushering in the psychedelic era. While President John Kennedy proclaimed a New Frontier and NASA journeyed to the moon, millions of young Americans began discovering their own new frontiers on a voyage to inner space. What had been the province of a fringe avant-garde only a decade earlier became a mass movement that affected and altered mainstream America.
And so America sped through the century, dropping acid and eating magic mushrooms at home, shooting heroin and ingesting amphetamines in Vietnam, snorting cocaine in the disco era, smoking crack cocaine in the devastated inner cities of the 1980s, discovering MDMA (Ecstasy) in the rave culture of the 1990s.
Can't Find My Way Home tells this extraordinary story by weaving together first-person accounts and historical background into a narrative vast in scope yet rich in intimate detail. Among those who describe their experiments with consciousness are Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Robert Stone, Wavy Gravy, Grace Slick, Oliver Stone, Peter Coyote, David Crosby, and many others from Haight Ashbury to Studio 54 to housing projects and rave warehouses.
But Can't Find My Way Home does not neglect the recovery movement, the war on drugs, and the ongoing debate over drug policy. And even as Martin Torgoff tells the story of his own addiction and recovery, he neither romanticizes nor demonizes drugs. If he finds them less dangerous than the moral crusaders say they are, he also finds them less benign than advocates insist.
Illegal drugs changed the cultural landscape of America, and they continue to shape our country, with enormous consequences. This ambitious, fascinating book is the story of how that happened.
Can't Find My Way Home is a history of illicit drug use in America in the second half of the twentieth century and a personal journey through the drug experience. It's the remarkable story of how America got high, the epic tale of how the American Century transformed into the Great Stoned Age.
Martin Torgoff begins with the avant-garde worlds of bebop jazz and the emerging Beat writers, who embraced the consciousness-altering properties of marijuana and other underground drugs. These musicians and writers midwifed the age of marijuana in the 1960s even as Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) discovered the power of LSD, ushering in the psychedelic era. While President John Kennedy proclaimed a New Frontier and NASA journeyed to the moon, millions of young Americans began discovering their own new frontiers on a voyage to inner space. What had been the province of a fringe avant-garde only a decade earlier became a mass movement that affected and altered mainstream America.
And so America sped through the century, dropping acid and eating magic mushrooms at home, shooting heroin and ingesting amphetamines in Vietnam, snorting cocaine in the disco era, smoking crack cocaine in the devastated inner cities of the 1980s, discovering MDMA (Ecstasy) in the rave culture of the 1990s.
Can't Find My Way Home tells this extraordinary story by weaving together first-person accounts and historical background into a narrative vast in scope yet rich in intimate detail. Among those who describe their experiments with consciousness are Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Robert Stone, Wavy Gravy, Grace Slick, Oliver Stone, Peter Coyote, David Crosby, and many others from Haight Ashbury to Studio 54 to housing projects and rave warehouses.
But Can't Find My Way Home does not neglect the recovery movement, the war on drugs, and the ongoing debate over drug policy. And even as Martin Torgoff tells the story of his own addiction and recovery, he neither romanticizes nor demonizes drugs. If he finds them less dangerous than the moral crusaders say they are, he also finds them less benign than advocates insist.
Illegal drugs changed the cultural landscape of America, and they continue to shape our country, with enormous consequences. This ambitious, fascinating book is the story of how that happened.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2005-05-09
- - pages
- Paperback
- Simon & Schuster
Similar books
-
Childhood in Global Perspective
By Karen Wells... may be taken in by other family members or they may , as is increasingly the case in Africa , establish their own households , with the eldest children acting as heads of households ( Audemard and Vignikin 2006 ; Robson et al .
-
Understanding Human Behavior and the Social Environment
By Karen Kay Kirst-Ashman, Charles ZastrowIn this best-selling text BY social workers and FOR social workers, Charles Zastrow and Karen K. Kirst-Ashman, nationally prominent social work educators and authors, guide studetns in assessing and evaluating how individuals function ...
-
Understanding Human Behavior and the Social Environment
By Karen Kay Kirst-Ashman, Charles ZastrowKiev , A. ( 1980 , September ) . The courage to live . Cosmopolitan , pp . 301-308 . Kim , N. , Stanton , B. , Li , X. , Dickersin , K. , & Galbraith , J. ( 1997 ) . Effectiveness of the 40 adolescent AIDS - risk reduction interventions ...
-
Mapping the Social Landscape: Readings in Sociology
By Susan J. FergusonCharrière , H. 1969. Papillon . Robert Lafont . ... 6 NOT OUR KIND OF GIRL ELAINE BELL KAPLAN Social research is concerned with the definition and assessment of social phenomena . Many social concepts such as teen pregnancy are ...
-
淡定的爱, 优雅的活
By （美）卡耐基, 张艾佳行走世间，唯有淡定不破：遇事不慌、遇人不躁，拥有淡定、优雅的心，你，就可以重生！——美国心灵教父戴尔 ...
-
Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas
By Karen KampwirthBooth, John. 1985. The End and the Beginning: The Nicaraguan Revolution. Boulder: Westview. Booth, John, and Thomas W. Walker. 1989. Understanding Central America. Boulder: Westview Borge, Tomás. 1984. Carlos, the Dawn Ls No Longer ...
-
Social Structure and Law: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives
By William M. EvanReaders will profit from studying this volume which sets forth a rationale for theoretical and empirical contributions to the sociology of law.
-
Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality
By Nell Irvin Painter, Homi K. Bhabha, Kimberlé CrenshawAs I wrote in a recent tribute to Justice Marshall: There appears to be a deliberate retrenchment by a majority of the current Supreme Court on many basic issues of human rights that Thurgood Marshall advocated and that the Warren and ...
-
The Civilizing Process
By Norbert EliasThe Civilizing Process
-
Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America
By Robert HughesCriticizes Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Jessie Helms, and Ronald Reagan, political correctness, academic obsessions with theory, the art world, American infrastructure, and other targets