A review by clay1st
Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story by Ann Shulgin, Alexander Shulgin

3.0

The first half, written by Shulgin himself I would rate 4 stars.
It's a biography of his life as a chemist, it's interesting and entertaining and definitely worth a read if you're interested in psychopharmacology.

The second half, written by Ann Shulgin I would rate 2 stars or possibly 1 star.
It's a painstaking account of her romantic conquest to woo Shulgin mixed with some accounts of psychedelic experiences. It's totally cringe. I was hoping it would move on from the romance and onto some more adventurous plotting related to Shulgin's renegade-chemist professional work. Instead the painstaking accounts of their unhappy love-triangle go on and on and the psychedelic experience accounts contain nothing profound, other than generic descriptions of the personal profundity of such experiences.