This Is Burning Man - Hardcover

Born in New York City, I've lived in various Florida cities, (with Gainesville closest to my heart), Washington D.C., and now Los Angeles. But mostly I've lived inside my head and inside books. Burning Man, the subject of my first book, is an opening to a world where I could be encouraged to actually grapple with the physical world at its starkest and harshest-hot metal, burning wood, pulsing kerosene jets, a place where I learned how to dig and plane and trench and assemble and weld (a little) and try to reconcile my brain with my body and with the physical world. In a way, I could say I wasn't fully born until discovering the subject matter of my first book. I'm a man made of books, always reading a dozen at a time, and I've loved hundreds. But my soul and intellect were most sparked, most propelled in fruitful directions, by the elegant and wild imaginings of science fiction writers like Gene Wolfe and Barry Malzberg; by the 20th century's most anarchistic and inspirational epic, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus!; and by the political and economic writings of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises, who helped teach me what freedom could mean and how it could work. Brian Doherty is a senior editor at Reason magazine, a monthly focusing on politics and culture. He has written for dozens of publications, ranging from the Washington Post to USA Today to Salon.com, and his work has been anthologized in many books. He lives in Los Angeles and has attended Burning Man for the past nine years.

It's tough to categorize Burning Man. Is it an excuse for thousands of anarchic, sexually uninhibited people to do drugs and destroy things? A massive, do-it-yourself arts festival for the punk avant-garde? Or is it the "spontaneous flowering" of a new, subversive culture? Reason magazine editor Doherty explores these definitions and others in this gushing yet well-researched mix of journalism and memoir. Burning Man began in the mid-1980s, when some friends burned a wooden effigy on a California beach. The event soon relocated to the Nevada desert, where, apparently, the civilized world's rules no longer applied. People could play golf with burning toilet paper rolls or whip each other at the Temple of Atonement. One year, someone piled 10 tons of half-burned pianos on top of each other, creating a huge "metapercussion instrument." Another year, a man calling himself "Dr. Megavolt" donned a metal suit and danced with electricity generated by a towering Tesla coil. By 2003, more than 30,000 pilgrims were participating, and Burning Man had become a $6-million "culture business" that many saw as a sellout of its humble origins. Doherty is an enthusiastic devotee, and he adds his own memories to this account. This insider's look at a cornerstone of American subculture is informative, though nearly as chaotic as Burning Man itself. Photos.
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