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America in the 1960s was a hotbed of cultural and intellectual ferment—spiritual, sexual, racial, and political. Wolf-Dieter Storl, whose family immigrated to the United States from a Germany ravaged by the Second World War, experienced this upheaval firsthand. Trying his luck at a surprising array of careers and experimenting with different lifestyles, he crossed paths with hillbillies, hobos, bikers, hippies, scholars, spiritualists, Black Panthers, student revolutionaries, smut peddlers, perverts, and psychedelic explorers—just to name a few.
Through the candidly personal lens of a budding cultural anthropologist and ethnobotanist, Storl relates these encounters with a refreshingly nuanced perspective. Unlike most books about the sixties, "Far Out in America" steers clear of overly romanticized nostalgia and the moralizing hand-wringing of cultural conservatives. It is a vivid portrait of a country that is neither what its detractors, nor its defenders, imagine it to be. For Storl, a social outsider who sampled freely from everything this acid-drenched era had to offer, the strangest trip of all was the American experience itself.
Wolf-Dieter Storl was born in Saxony, Germany in 1942 and immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was eleven years old. After attending college at Ohio State University, he completed his MA in Anthropology at Kent State University, where he also taught. In 1974 he received his PhD in Ethnology in Bern, Switzerland, as a Fulbright scholar. Mankind’s cultural relationship with the plant world is the theme of most of his writings, and his books and presentations weave myth and folklore together with natural history. Recent works appearing in English include: "Healing Lyme Disease Naturally" (2010), "The Herbal Lore of Wise Women and Wortcunners" (2012), "A Curious History of Vegetables" (2016), and "The Untold History of Healing" (2017). He has also contributed to the journal "TYR: Myth—Culture—Tradition," published by Arcana Europa.