I was introduced to Kimon de Greef’s work this spring when I was producing our Longreads questionnaire with Patrick Radden Keefe. In his response to a question on the last book he read, Keefe mentioned de Greef’s “totally wild” book called The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence. I immediately googled it and requested a copy. With a title like that, how could you not?
The Ego Trip, which will be released on August 4, expands on the story de Greef explored in his 2022 New Yorker feature, “The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads.” It’s as fascinating as the title promises: a deeply reported book on the rise and fall of a Mexican doctor who built a psychedelic movement around smoking the secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad.
De Greef’s other stories are just as compulsively readable, dropping us into worlds that most of us have never even thought about and introducing us to memorable characters: There’s a Syrian immigrant trapper in New York who communicates with raccoons and refuses to kill them, and a Guyanese importer trying to do right in a world of songbird smuggling. There’s a Native American woman unable to harvest wild white sage on Southern California land stripped bare by poachers, and miners searching for leftover gold in South Africa’s illegal mines.
