This Is Burning Man [Hardcover]

Brian Doherty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 4, 2004

Doherty provides detailed information on the outrageous festival---its inception, history, growth, and players--for the hundreds of thousands who have attended, as well as those who only wish they had.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It's tough to categorize Burning Man. Is it an excuse for thousands of anarchic, sexually uninhibited people to do drugs and destroy things? A massive, do-it-yourself arts festival for the punk avant-garde? Or is it the "spontaneous flowering" of a new, subversive culture? Reason magazine editor Doherty explores these definitions and others in this gushing yet well-researched mix of journalism and memoir. Burning Man began in the mid-1980s, when some friends burned a wooden effigy on a California beach. The event soon relocated to the Nevada desert, where, apparently, the civilized world's rules no longer applied. People could play golf with burning toilet paper rolls or whip each other at the Temple of Atonement. One year, someone piled 10 tons of half-burned pianos on top of each other, creating a huge "metapercussion instrument." Another year, a man calling himself "Dr. Megavolt" donned a metal suit and danced with electricity generated by a towering Tesla coil. By 2003, more than 30,000 pilgrims were participating, and Burning Man had become a $6-million "culture business" that many saw as a sellout of its humble origins. Doherty is an enthusiastic devotee, and he adds his own memories to this account. This insider's look at a cornerstone of American subculture is informative, though nearly as chaotic as Burning Man itself. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

True-believer Doherty loves Burning Man, the annual festival for aging Aquarians and seekers of all New Agey^B stripes that involves the erection in the Nevada desert of a giant statue alongside a temporary city of alternative lifestyle enthusiasts practicing, to varying degrees, alternative models of commerce, artistic pursuit, and other social and recreational gambits for about a week. Then the giant statue gets torched, and everybody returns to presumably more humdrum everyday pursuits. The fest encourages a "no spectators" attitude to the effect that celebrants' doings aren't to be reported, and Doherty attended four times before he "dreamed of writing about it for public consumption." Now he presents a combination of what he witnessed and experienced and "journalistic re-creations" of the stories and reminiscences of some 100 interviewees, including people he "just lived moments with." How sixties can you get? This magical approach, while it makes the book questionable as verifiable social reportage, serves the BM ethos well. A lovingly, if not crisply, written tribute. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1ST edition (August 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316711543
• ISBN-13: 978-0316711548
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,094,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best BM book ever, and guide to networking subcultures, October 22, 2004

By 

Theseus Augustus "Keenly watching the 21st ce... (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: This Is Burning Man (Hardcover)

This is by far the best book on Burning Man to come out for those interested in the history, economy, politics and detailed life stories behind the event. I hear that there are more detailed studies of the event coming out in the next year or two. I hope this book inspires more people, especially academicians, to keep thinking about this global cultural phenomenon seriously.

What I found especially useful about this book is that the stories therein constitute a case history for subcultural networking and community building. If you are interested in building synaptic networks between subcultures, this book could be a powerful guide.

This book illustrates the power of synchronicity and simple friendship. If Larry Harvey and Mary Graubarger had not come to San Francisco, had Larry not met Mary at Baker Beach, had the Cacophony Society not discovered Harvey's beach burn, would any of this have happened?

Though much of what came together may have been accident (or destiny), it is clear from the book that Larry Harvey is a true subcultural Faustian (in Howard Bloom's [Global Brain] sense). Without Harvey's leadership, and subtle and intuitive grasp of the nascent unconscious symbolic substratum that he had uncovered, the spiderweb of networks and relationships that followed his work probably would never have developed into anything close to the Burning Man we know and love. In short, it takes leadership and luck to build community.

This book is more than a book about Burning Man. It is a manual to building communities of cultural creatives everywhere.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant!, August 21, 2004

By 

WALT! "WALT!" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: This Is Burning Man (Hardcover)

This is the first comprehensive book that details the evolution and challenged existence of the annual Nevada event known as Burning Man. The author skillfully chronicles the history of Burning Man with deft insight into its principle characters that made the event what it is today. A true page turner for any Burner, and a great introduction for anyone with the slightest curiosity as to what is Burning Man.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a bunch of blessed mind-fugging pranksters, August 23, 2004

By 

K (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: This Is Burning Man (Hardcover)

This is an intelligent page-turner about a strange people who spend a great deal of their time attending to arcane activities. These people constitute an underground community of sorts (mostly West Coast, mostly urban) and Burning Man is their annual X-Mass celebration. "Burners," as the milieu refers to its own, come in nearly every flavor but if I were pressed to generalize about them I'd insist that more than anything they taste like the grubby progeny of Merry Pranksters and Yippies. In other words, a bunch of blessed mind-fugging pranksters.

Kidding aside, this is an excellent book. It reminds me more than anything else of Tom Wolfe's ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST. I say this not just because of the subject matter but because of Brian Doherty's prose. The big difference between Wolfe and Doherty though in regard to their respective books is that Doherty was directly involved in much of what he writes about. Wolfe was not. And, as far as the similar subject matter is concerned, what I said already goes: Burners (among many other things it must be said) are the offspring of the Merry Pranksters.

Oh, and by the way, I've never been to Burning Man and to be honest I doubt I'll ever go. But I loved this book. I think it ought to be of interest to anyone interested in contemporary culture and its permutations. And boy is Burning Man a doozy of a permutation.