Overview

'We are all born flightless, every one. After so many thousands of years each of us still drops into the world smooth-skinned and featherless.' Why have we never been content to keep our feet on the ground? In the 1960s this desire to get high exploded with the LSD counterculture and the Apollo missions. In this unique and dazzling book, acclaimed author Kester Brewin (MUTINY / AFTER MAGIC) explores the history of the human quest for transcendence, and how, following a family tragedy, it blighted his own life. Drawing on a huge cast of characters from the Montgolfier brothers to Renaissance artists, Hells Angels, astronauts, The Beatles, Gonzo journalists and dreaming hippies, GETTING HIGH is a wild trip into the ancient dream of flight, soaring through shamanic ritual, enlightenment science and punching a hole in what we think the 1960s was all about. Interwoven in all of this is Brewin's own story. Growing up in a mining village in Yorkshire, his father was the local vicar, the man tasked with lifting this subterranean community each Sunday and offer it a vision of the above. But this pressure to open heaven has terrible consequences for the family, and a tragic illness sends each of them flying. Skilfully linking ancient history, the story of the 1960s and his own battles with the yearning to 'get high, ' this is an important and timely book with an urgent message about religion, the promises of technology, and our need to keep our feet on the ground.

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9780993562808

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Reviews

'A beautiful meditation on flight, memory and meaning in a world still struggling to come to terms with the loss of the Most High' - Simon Critchley, Han Jonas Professor of Philosophy, The New School, New York. 'The ability to craft a such beautifully coherent story out of so many disparate worlds is a truly rare gift. When Nietzsche asked how we might wash holy blood off our hands after the worst of all murders, there was really only one solution: we would ascend. We would delve into our clever psyches while conquering the skies, we would innovate our technologies while sketching our poetry, we would taste our new chemicals while confessing our sins on vinyl, and perhaps we might think ourselves gods. Getting High is Brewin at his best.' - Tad Delay, author of God is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Theology

Author Information

A mathematics teacher working in South East London, Kester Brewin has also become one of the leading thinkers on the philosophy of religion and technology. The power of his work lies in the synthesis of ideas from disparate fields, playing the history of piracy off a psychotherapeutic reading of Star Wars, or pushing Harry Potter to play alongside both Batman and Shakespeare's Prospero. Accessible, challenging and richly rewarding, his work has been hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as some of the most courageous and unflinching theological writing of recent years, charting his own path from the orthodox belief of his childhood to a radical death-of-God reading of Christian atheism.

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