[Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.

While not as revelatory as Pollan’s major works, this is a wonderful and compelling read that will leave you thinking long after you set it down.

Pollan is a gentle, generous writer, so it is to his credit that he realises that an account of how he felt when he stopped drinking coffee for a few months was hardly likely to provide narrative drama. That doesn’t stop him doing it, with predictably tedious consequences, but he constructs a nice chapter all the same out of other bits of information..

Pollan is not particularly interested in recommending that readers scale back on coffee or experiment with opium tea. Instead, he wants readers to unlearn biases about drugs to make space for new cultural conversations about these psychoactive substances.

As with all the explorations in this spirited and informed series of quests, the results of these experiments open up as many public questions as private epiphanies. Pollan is the perfect guide through this sometimes controversial territory; curious, careful and, as his book progresses, increasingly open minded..

[Pollan's] descriptions of London’s coffee house culture and Honoré de Balzac’s barbarous habit of ingesting dry coffee grounds to fuel all-night scribbling sessions are worth the book’s price alone.

Pollan is a mindful and enthusiastic psychonaut. He is also a gifted writer, who synthesizes unruly social histories and wreathes them around his own drug-taking experiences. And he articulates these experiences with great insight and eloquence, and without the usual clack that typifies so-called 'trip reports.' But Michael Pollan has never explicitly cast himself in his writing as a pro-legalization advocate or anything like it. Late in How to Change Your Mind, he expresses his hope that the psychedelic experience will be more widely embraced, even outside of strictly 'therapeutic' contexts. But then he pulls his punch. 'Does that mean I think these drugs should simply be legalized? Not quite.' Instead, he maintains that one-on-one sessions with an experienced guide (whether a lab-coated clinician or an underground urban shaman) may be the ideal.

Mr. Pollan’s vast blanket of historical and scholarly reference is summer-weight but delightfully patterned, rich in anecdote and lively quotation. The book’s competing tendency towards gonzo journalism, however, is less successful, his feats of self-experimentation oddly anticlimactic.

... a tour around three substances: caffeine, mescaline and opium.

Pollan is very conscious about being a white man writing about Native American culture, which is not his own. He worries about appropriation, a sensitive subject these days, that runs all the way through his new book.

Pollan weaves together three separately engaging stories in a pleasantly meandering style, deftly using his personal experiences with each compound as a jumping-off point for small forays into anthropology, history, politics, psychology, molecular biology, and neuroscience. Even the most distracted reader will come away with an understanding of the physical effects of the spotlighted substances as well as their cultural significance.

Readers of How to Change Your Mind will recognize Pollan’s thoughtful and scientific approach to the subject of psychedelic drugs and altered states of consciousness. This Is Your Mind on Plants is an entertaining blend of memoir, history and social commentary that illustrates Pollan’s ability to be both scientific and personal. By relying on contextual history and focusing on three popular, if misunderstood, drugs, Pollan challenges common views on what mind-altering drugs are and what they can accomplish..

A wide-ranging investigation that will interest anyone curious about consciousness-altering substances and their varying legality..

... briskly enlightening if intermittently cursory.

To his credit, the author also wrestles with issues of cultural appropriation, since in some places it’s now easier for a suburbanite to grow San Pedro cacti than for a Native American to use it ceremonially.

Blending artful exposition of the evolution and neurochemistry of botanical drugs, erudite history, and (usually) precise and evocative prose, this is an insightful take on plants’ beguiling sway over the human psyche..