David Jay Brown Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse Contemplating the Future with Noam Chomsky, George Carlin, Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake and Others

In his latest interview collection, David Jay Brown has once again gathered some of the most interesting minds of today to consider the future of the human race, the mystery of consciousness, the evolution of technology, psychic phenomena, and more. The book includes conversations with celebrated visionaries and inspirational figures such as Ram Dass, Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, and George Carlin. Part scientific exploration, part philosophical speculation, and part intellectual rollercoaster, the free-form discussions are original and captivating, and offer surprising revelations. Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalpyse is a new look into the minds of some of our groundbreaking leaders and is the perfect gift for science fiction and philosophy fans alike.

Science fiction author (Brainchild; Virus) and journalist David Jay Brown is keenly interested in the future and what it forebodes for humanity in terms of our ability to navigate through our current world of uncertainties and its ongoing conflicts. To get a better idea of where we are going, he interviewed over 20 visionary and provocative thinkers, ranging from Deepak Chopra, Noam Chomsky, Edgar Mitchell, Ram Dass, and Rupert Sheldrake, to Douglas Rushkoff, Robert Anton Wilson, Peter Russell, and iconoclastic comedian George Carlin. Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse is the result. Instead of a predictable roadmap to the future, Brown and his interview subjects paint a provocative picture of possibilities both perilous and exhilarating. Along the way, they also repeatedly explore the essential role consciousness will play, and already is playing, in shaping the world we are collectively heading towards, as well as how it is impacting and being impacted upon by such factors as language, politics, chemistry (including consciousness-expanding drugs), emotions, psychic phenomena, robotics, spirituality, shamanism, art, and alien encounters. This is a book that will appeal to all readers interested in becoming more aware of current world developments, both positive and negative, and what can be done about them to ensure a better world tomorrow.--Larry Trivieri Jr.

From Publishers Weekly
The Big Questions addressed in these hazy, wearisome interviews-Is there a God? Does consciousness survive death?-are the kind of imponderables your Aunt Martha would know as much about as the thinkers showcased here. But these interviewees are more likely than Aunt Martha to invoke "nonlocality" and "quantum holography" to give their mysticism a pseudo-scientific gloss. Brown, author of interview collections like Mavericks of the Mind, has a rigid, checklist style of interviewing in which he invites discussion of his pet spiritual and New Age hobbyhorses, including parapsychology and extraterrestrials. Sheldrake, Dean Radin and Apollo-14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, all of the "Institute of Noetic Sciences," insist on the "vast abundance of compelling scientific evidence for psychic phenomena," while the late Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack calls the alien abduction phenomenon "totally real," although he's "not sure how it's real-in other words, in what dimension it's occurring." Brown is especially interested in the interviewees' ubiquitous use of psychedelic drugs for consciousness-raising; predictably, they respond with vague dilations ("psychedelics helped me to see the vastness, the nondimensional, the altered dimensional... a tumbling of awareness," says medical marijuana activist Valerie Corral) that readers will find an inadequate substitute for dropping acid themselves. Brown also includes some skeptics, like the redoubtable Chomsky and sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling, who pithily pours cold water on Brown's enthusiasms. On the whole, this is a dull, opaque and implausible commentary.