ALTERED STATE. By Matthew Collin and John Godfrey. Serpent's Tail; 314 pages; K10.99 and $16.99 THE title "Altered State" is appropriate for a book that sets out to document the effects of a small pill on the culture of a nation. The...

Brian Kent has a complaint. In an age of complaining for complaining's sake, this would hardly be news were it not for the fact that his is valid. Mr. Kent is the Gardiner artist who created one of the four final designs for...

Quizzes are fun, but what do they really tell you? This one reveals the dangers to which many of us subject our primary love relationships—and the denial that goes with the territory. It was created by Pat Love, the noted sex and relationship expert and...

To Michael Ruhlman, dining at a four-star restaurant is akin to a religious experience. “The meaning of life could be found in an onion,” he writes in his new book, The Reach of a Chef, “and the battle of a busy restaurant service could deliver...

[What] is a successful, much-admired dramatist doing here, in a wild-eyed, exclamation-pointed science fiction?… "Altered States" is Mr. Chayefsky's first novel. It reads, however, more like a screen treatment that someone rashly advised him to "novelize"—a process that may itself be biologically impossible. Instead of camera close-ups of mild-mannered endocrinologists registering horror at the brink of the Dread Unknown, instead of stunning cinematography an...

Eddie Jessup, the ambitious, monomaniacal scientist of Chayefsky's [Altered States, seeks] … consciousness of the "original self," but in the form of "a real, mensurate, quantifiable thing, tangible and incarnate." During his postgraduate research in physiology, Jessup accidentally stumbles upon the convergent phenomena of mind-altering experiences, as manifested through hallucinogenic drugs, sensory deprivation, Zen meditation, and schizophrenia. Readers conversant...