Review
"Boon's new work reads... like a wide-eyed, joyous romp through a literary stateman's funhouse, where each room contains a masterfully told tale of opium or morphine, peyote or LSD, coffee or cocaine. We see a gallery of our most prized literary lions, many of them stripped bare of their pristine reputations. It is a mind-teasing exercise that is well worth the trip." - Rebecca Shannonhouse, Boston Globe; "Boon has written the most useful and engaging history of psychoactive lit yet. His prose is generous, unburried, and far too tasteful to gob up the page with theory. At the same time, he casts his net deep and wide, drawing in folks as disparate as Chaucer, Kant, and Iceberg Slim. Boon is not content to merely record the encounter between modern writers and drugs, he deepens the story as well, and, amazingly, he does it without exploiting the rhetoric of personal experience or subversive hip." - Erik Davis, Bookforum"
The Sunday Telegraph, 12 January 2001
As a guide to the literary history of drug-taking, his book is unlikely to be bettered for a long time.