Tag: reading

The Science of Utopia?

Book cover of Tripping on Utopia

I just finished reading Benjamin Breen’s Tripping on Utopia for my book club. This was one of those nice instances where I got to read some history for pleasure. The book was pretty much perfect for this kind of exercise. Breen is an excellent narrator and he makes the story truly compelling even as it goes into a great deal of detail and includes a dizzying array of people who were involved in psychedelic research around Margaret Mead’s circle. The book argues that Margaret Mead and many of those around here — notably her one-time husband Gregory Bateson — saw psychedelics as one path toward a new world order based on expanding human consciousness so to bring the world closer together. They meant this both as an ideology — respect and appreciation for cultural difference was at the center of their belief system — and as practice — they once argued for a world government in order to do away with nationalism (72-79). Mead rested these hopes, Breen argues, on a faith in science.

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The Professor’s Bookshelf

I was asked to participate in an article for Loyola’s student newspaper on books that shaped me. The full article has some great reads (and some questionable ones, I admit). They didn’t include my full explanations of my choices, so here they are:

Orientalism by Edward Said: This was my introduction to critical theory and to the concept of social construction and has influenced me ever since I read it in college. It gave me a new way of understanding power and our place in the world. 

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Probably the book I’ve re-read the most; I never regret entering into Tolkien’s world.

Gay New York by George Chauncey: Another college read, this book introduced me to queer history and helped launch me into my own career.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin: This was actually the Humanities Symposium text from a few years ago. A classic science fiction tale that also helped me better understand the malleability of sex and gender.

The Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick: An essential introduction to the way heterosexist society creates cycles of shame and enforces silence (while also declaring that we don’t need to hear “it”), this foundational work of queer theory is also an interrogation into the queer subtext (and text) of novels I also love (like Billy Budd and In Search of Lost Time).

Currently Reading

Got more books on my mind than usual these days. Some initial thoughts:

Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen: This one is for my book club and I’m finding it fascinating. I confess I knew very little about Margaret Mead beyond the basics. I’m about a third of the way through this (extremely well-written) book and am finding the ways her humanistic anthropology led her not only to the idea that psychedelics might expand our ability to connect to one another, but also to working directly with the CIA to be fascinating and delightfully in tension with one another. So many people enter the orbit of Mead and her cohort you basically come away reading a chapter of this book thinking Breen has found an entry point to explaining the whole of American society during the decades he covers.

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner: I’m very far into a years (maybe decades) long project of reading all the Hugo winners for best novel. This quest continues despite the recent controversies (Babel absolutely should have been nominated, but the winner, Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher was the better book). I’m only a couple chapters into this one, but the introduction to the edition I got from my awesome local library served as a warning when it referenced Georges Perec as an influence. I will finish this, but the postmodern conceits are strong in this one.

Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France by Holly Grout: I’m just about done with Holly Grout’s new book on Sarah Bernhardt, Collette, and Josephine Baker’s relationship to Cleopatra. This might be considered a “work” book that I picked up in order to draft a chapter of an edited volume I am working on, but it hasn’t been as relevant as I had hoped. That said, the book is an excellent companion to Grout’s first book on beauty and effectively showcases the ways that these three actors put on display and mixed up the sexual and racial politics of the Third Republic.

Want to Critique Black Studies? Read Some Books

Timothy Burke provides would-be critics of Black Studies with a required reading list.  Only required for those wishing to keep their day jobs at the Chronicle of Higher of Education.