Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Streatfeild, a documentary film producer and author of a social history of cocaine use (Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, 2001), offers an expansive and multifaceted exploration of brainwashing in its multitude of forms. With chapters on hypnosis, sensory deprivation, subliminal messages, religious indoctrination, and a variety of truth serums, this account chronicles the many ways psychology and pharmacology have been enlisted in people's apparently perennial effort to control the minds of other people. Steeped in cold war intrigue, Streatfeild's narrative features the CIA and other intelligence agencies heavily; tales oscillate between the absurdly hilarious (CIA director Allen Dulles dispatching two agents to Switzerland in 1953 to buy up the world's entire supply of LSD for "research") and the profoundly disturbing (CIA agents secretly dosing civilians and analyzing the results). Although the author includes some lengthy jaunts into popular culture to examine films and song lyrics, his core concern is the deadly serious business of mental torture as practiced by today's intelligence services. Sprawling, accessible, and at times quite casual, this book will attract a diverse readership.Brendan DriscollCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved