webbykevin
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2010
- Messages
- 1,720
The brotherhood of the screaming abyss.
anyone bought it ?
here is a bad review of it from amazon.....
This is an auto-biography. It's not really about Terence McKenna. It's about Dennis McKenna, which would be fine, if this book hadn't been funded in the most part by people who wanted to know more about Terence - and bought by the same sorts of people.
Most of the controversial (read: interesting) elements of Terence's life are almost entirely glossed over. The fact that he apparently stopped using psychedelics after a particularly dark trip, for instance, is not addressed - although it was bought to light prior to the book's publication, it must have been edited out. This is extremely disappointing. I'm not kidding when I say that the biggest questions associated with Terence are dismissed in one or two throwaway lines, whilst pages are devoted to minor romantic relationships in Dennis' life, including high school crushes, etc.
What becomes apparent during a reading of this book is that Terence and Dennis McKenna don't appear to have been all that close. Aside from the events that Terence himself wrote about in True Hallucinations, Dennis is pretty up front about not having had a lot to do with Terence. This means that large tracts of this book are dedicated to fairly mundane details about Dennis' career and love life.
I think I could have stood the lack of detail re: Terence's personal life, had there not been quite so very much (entirely unnecessary) detail about Dennis' in here.
The book feels somewhat like a bait and switch. I very much doubt that the Kickstarter would have been funded if people had known that it would be so timid to directly address the questions we really had about Terence McKenna - what was he like as a person? Dennis says that he was very loquacious and charming, but we knew that already. There was nothing beyond the exceptionally obvious revealed.
This book is not entirely without value, some of the tales about the early years are quite charming and here and there a few snippets of real insight break through amidst the minutinae but sadly Dennis appears to have only truly connected with his brother in early childhood and early adulthood - the rest of this book is, as I mentioned earlier, a very detailed history of Dennis' ethnobotanical career and romantic entanglements.
As a side note, I find it odd how many of the positive reviews on this book seem to be from people who rated and reviewed before they actually read the book - or who don't appear to have read the book at all. It doesn't say much for the McKenna legacy that people aren't even taking the time to read the book before raving about it. I'm a big fan of Terence McKenna, and Dennis McKenna is clearly an excellent scholar - but this book isn't what it was declared to be on the label.
wondered if anyone here has read it yet and could offer an opinion before i waste 20 bucks .
anyone bought it ?
here is a bad review of it from amazon.....
This is an auto-biography. It's not really about Terence McKenna. It's about Dennis McKenna, which would be fine, if this book hadn't been funded in the most part by people who wanted to know more about Terence - and bought by the same sorts of people.
Most of the controversial (read: interesting) elements of Terence's life are almost entirely glossed over. The fact that he apparently stopped using psychedelics after a particularly dark trip, for instance, is not addressed - although it was bought to light prior to the book's publication, it must have been edited out. This is extremely disappointing. I'm not kidding when I say that the biggest questions associated with Terence are dismissed in one or two throwaway lines, whilst pages are devoted to minor romantic relationships in Dennis' life, including high school crushes, etc.
What becomes apparent during a reading of this book is that Terence and Dennis McKenna don't appear to have been all that close. Aside from the events that Terence himself wrote about in True Hallucinations, Dennis is pretty up front about not having had a lot to do with Terence. This means that large tracts of this book are dedicated to fairly mundane details about Dennis' career and love life.
I think I could have stood the lack of detail re: Terence's personal life, had there not been quite so very much (entirely unnecessary) detail about Dennis' in here.
The book feels somewhat like a bait and switch. I very much doubt that the Kickstarter would have been funded if people had known that it would be so timid to directly address the questions we really had about Terence McKenna - what was he like as a person? Dennis says that he was very loquacious and charming, but we knew that already. There was nothing beyond the exceptionally obvious revealed.
This book is not entirely without value, some of the tales about the early years are quite charming and here and there a few snippets of real insight break through amidst the minutinae but sadly Dennis appears to have only truly connected with his brother in early childhood and early adulthood - the rest of this book is, as I mentioned earlier, a very detailed history of Dennis' ethnobotanical career and romantic entanglements.
As a side note, I find it odd how many of the positive reviews on this book seem to be from people who rated and reviewed before they actually read the book - or who don't appear to have read the book at all. It doesn't say much for the McKenna legacy that people aren't even taking the time to read the book before raving about it. I'm a big fan of Terence McKenna, and Dennis McKenna is clearly an excellent scholar - but this book isn't what it was declared to be on the label.
wondered if anyone here has read it yet and could offer an opinion before i waste 20 bucks .
