Far Out in America

A German Ethnobotanist's Wild Roots in the Psychedelic Sixties By Wolf Dieter Storl Arcana Europa/Wild Lives, 448 pages, ISBN 9798486264788 America in the 1960s was a hotbed of cultural and intellectual ferment—spiritual, sexual, racial, and political. Wolf-Dieter Storl, whose family immigrated to the United States from a Germany ravaged by the Second World War, experienced this upheaval firsthand. Trying his luck at a surprising array of careers and experimenting with different lifestyles, he crossed paths with hillbillies, hobos, bikers, hippies, scholars, spiritualists, Black Panthers, student revolutionaries, smut peddlers, perverts, and psychedelic explorers—just to name a few. Through the candidly personal lens of a budding cultural anthropologist and ethnobotanist, Storl relates these encounters with a refreshingly nuanced perspective. Unlike most books about the sixties, Far Out in America steers clear of overly romanticized nostalgia and the moralizing hand-wringing of cultura