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Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna Paperback – January 1, 2012

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For those who lived through what is sometimes called the Psychedelic Revolution, Terrence McKenna is a legend. Once referred to as "the intellectual's Timothy Leary." Terence attained iconic status as a radical philosopher, futurist, cultural critic, and raconteur. His unorthodox ideas about the evolutionary and cultural impact of psychedelic drugs shocked many and resonated with many others. In 1971, we embarked on an expedition to the Amazon, bent on uncovering the real mystery behind psychedelic experience. Terrence died in 2000, never to learn if his predictions about the end of the world, in his particular sense, were true. As Terence's younger brother and only sibling, I grew up with him in a small town in western Colorado during the fifties and sixties. Traveling together in the Colombian Amazon in 1971 with a few other kindred spirits we called our band "the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss." As Terence's brother, I helped him create and develop many of "his" ideas. Terence became the spokesman for the alien dimensions accessed through psychedelics, a philosopher of the unspeakable, a beloved and sometimes reviled bard of the marvels and occasional terrors waiting in the recesses of human consciousness. By choice and inclination, I stayed in the background, pursuing a scientific career in disciplines that ranges from ethnopharmachology and ethnobotany to neuroscience. Since Terence's death, we've witnessed the first decade of a new era that by all early indications will be as strange and disturbing, as full of hope and despair, as any period that humanity has yet endured. I've been drawn to look back at how our personal world began. I wanted to retrace the journey that took us from our childhood to our separate destinies, stopping to revisit the people and ideas that shaped us

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Paperback: 508 pages
Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud; 1st edition (January 1, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0878396365
ISBN-13: 978-0878396368
Package Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 130 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #913,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Suza Francina

Do not miss out on reading this book by Terence's equally brilliant brother

August 14, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

If you lived through the counterculture of the sixties and seventies, if you read Food of the Gods and Terence McKenna's other revelations, if you heard him speak in person (as I did, long ago, at the Ojai Foundation) and were always curious to learn more, if you love well-written memoirs and biographies, if you want a deeper understanding of the era we live in, and a thousand other reasons---do not miss out on reading this biographical account by Terence's equally brilliant brother. Highly recommended!

---Suza Francina, yoga teacher and author

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Gilligan

Dennis is a World Treasure

May 8, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Dennis is not the showman his brother was, but his brother wasn't the expert Dennis is. Terence was a wizard of words and ideas. (Read Terence and listen to Terence--everything you can get your hands or ears on, by all means.) But you'd be very hard-pressed to find many living souls with the breadth of scientific expertise specifically in these compounds and plants, a Western cultural background and who can seamlessly marry that with a profound, long, deep and non-merely academic understanding of shamanism and visionary plants. This guy is maybe one of a handful on the planet with those qualifications. I would so like to hear more from him in the future about his perspective on the plants & compounds, the ayahuasqueros, his experiences and how to have my own in today's world of ayahuasca tourism and "the guy from Brazil doing the full moon party at Malibu".

Dennis's book was so guileless, and the more moving for it's guilelessness. I do feel I know Terence now more than I ever knew him before (having spent many workshops at Esalen with him in the 90's); more than I ever expected to be able to know him. Dennis's guilelessness is the mirror opposite of his brother's (as Terence himself put it) "dog and pony show". (And what a show it was!)

Don't get me wrong- I am a card carrying Terence fanatic. Adore the guy, still. And of course psychedelics was but one of his topics of interest and thought provocation. But my interest in psychedelics specifically makes me hope fervently for more output from Dennis.

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Never took another mushroom after 1989?

June 20, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a great book. I am very grateful to Dennis for writing it with such honesty and to the people on kickstarter who funded it. I learned a lot from the book. While some of the comments about the book needing better editing are right, bearing in mind that Dennis is not a professional author, if you are even half-interested in the subject matter, the book is definitely a four star piece of work and probably more given how rare these personal accounts are.

I was disappointed that probably the biggest revelation of the book appears to have been edited out in later prints. This is that Terrence had a very difficult mushroom trip about '89 with his wife Kat; he never took mushrooms again after this point and only took other psychedelics very infrequently; and everything after this personal crisis was fallout. Bruce Damer ran a seminar where he quotes at least two full pages from a fascinating and deeply revealing part of the book in a chapter called "Symbiosis Shattered". There is now no such chapter in the book, but the less revealing parts of Bruce's excerpt are still in the chapter called "The Bard in Light and Shadow". I think it's a shame that it has been removed from the book (as far as I can work out?) because there are very important lessons here for everyone including Terrence's fans (you can search for: Podcast 316 - "A Deep Dive Into the Mind of McKenna" to find Damer's seminar).

I can understand that it was very personal for Terrence, but I think that it could be revealed now that he has passed away. Anyway Dennis must have had a good reason to remove it. His book is about a family member. And I couldn't have been as honest as Dennis was in his book, discussing all of his failures, or lessons, in his romantic life to give just one example.

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Rita

A must read for any fan of McKenna

August 7, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I was a groupie of his brother Terence so this was a must read. I loved it. No one could capture him like Dennis. It was respectful yet brutally honest. Now I know that there was not just one genius in the McKenna clan. I hope to meet you someday. Bravo! Thank you Dennis.

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Amazon Customer

Essental companion to "True Hallucinations"

February 22, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Having recently re-read True Hallucinations and being much more impressed with it this time around, I jumped on this book as soon as I found out it existed. Yes, it's true what another reviewer said about this book not so much being a Terrence bio as it is a Dennis autobiography, but for me at least, that's somewhat beside the point. It could be argued that the ideas that Terrence put fourth are much more important and interesting than the man himself and that is more or less the approach Dennis takes with this book...An exhaustive investigation of Terrence's most well known ideas interwoven into an autobiographical narrative of Dennis's life. most interesting to me is Dennis's take on the infamous "Incident At La Chorrera" which makes it essential reading for anyone interested in that particular cultural blip.

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Amazon Customer

This book paints a great early life picture (reading Ch. 29)

October 2, 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I'm still reading and set to begin chapter 29. If you enjoy Terrence's work this is a great way to get to know Dennis. Dennis has a unique writing style, he's a very good storyteller from a neutral perspective, he's very descriptive, engaging and paints and wonderful surrounding picture of the era and it's effects on the US culture. I love this book so far, it's giving me a great deal of backstory on the two brothers early lives. I'd recommend this to any Terence/Dennis McKenna fans who'd like to have a better understanding of where these guys developed their perspectives.

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Jane

Such an interesting biography/autobiography of Terence McKenna and his brother ...

June 19, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Such an interesting biography/autobiography of Terence McKenna and his brother, Dennis. Very insightful for those of us who have been fans of Terence and his lectures.

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Sam

As a frequent listener of both Terence and Dennis, I found this to be a revealing and worthwhile journey.

May 28, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Though this book was not as I expected, it was interesting to put some of the pieces together to the work that was Terence's life. Despite their times of separation, Dennis does his best to shed light on his relationship to Terence. The book almost makes it seem as if by the end we'll rewrite history and bring him back from the abyss. If you want to experience Terence in another way other than youtube I implore you to give this book a try.

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