About the Author

Michael Pollan is an award-winning author, activist and journalist. His international bestselling books about the way we live today - including How to Change Your Mind, In Defence of Food and Food Rules -- combine meticulous reporting with anthropology, philosophy, culture, health and natural history. Time magazine has named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. He lives in the Bay Area of California with his wife.

Reviews

Pollan is always an entertaining writer, and a deep thinker with a light touch ... it's a trip - engrossing, eye-opening, mind altering.
*New Statesman*

This fascinating insight into our relationship with mind-altering plants weaves personal experimentation with cultural history ... Pollan is the perfect guide through this sometimes controversial territory; curious, careful and, as his book progresses, increasingly open minded.
*The Guardian*

Expert storytelling ... Pollan masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.
*New York Times Book Review*

Brilliant, compulsively readable ... Pollan's storytelling is deft, forthright and fascinating.
*The Oldie*

Like it or not, we are undergoing a drugs revolution ... thankfully Pollan is here to guide us through this putative challenge ... [this] relatable, middle class New York plant fancier might be the ideal standard bearer for today's calmer, more scientific approach to the subject.
*Sunday Times*

Pollan's intertwining of reportage, citizen science and historical scholarship is a delightful and informative read ... [he] has a rational optimism that might tempt even the most sober and sceptical to try to broaden their horizons.
*Literary Review*

Pollan is a gentle, generous writer.
*The Times*

Michael Pollan weaves tales of drug experimentation into a historical account of our long relationship with them.
*New Scientist*

This Is Your Mind on Plants is witty, entertaining and polite, but it is not trivial. Subtly but assuredly, Pollan argues that which plants (and fungi) we are allowed and how depends, consciously or otherwise, on the interests of power.
*Times Literary Supplement*

The 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 ... The book is really about the relation between each plant and the humans who consume it, tackled in a non-judgmental and objective way that seeks to dispel the ignorance, prejudice and demonisation they attract.
*Financial Times*

Fascinating and occasionally terrifying ... His opium chapter is mesmerising.
*Daily Mail*

A tour around three substances: caffeine, mescaline and opium. The first is legal, the others remain mostly illegal. Pollan offers us rich historical contexts for them that are often surprising.
*Independent*

Every now and then to be put in touch with what really matters - what could be more important than that?
*Irish Independent*