About
Allene Symons is a veteran journalist who holds a bachelor's in philosophy (with a journalism minor) from San Francisco State, and master's degrees in the fields of Communications (Journalism) and in History of Religions (Buddhism). She was a writer, book reviewer, and senior editor for Publishers Weekly in New York (1982-1988), and has written for other specialty magazines in the musical instrument and pharmacy fields.
She was born in Long Beach, California, and has lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. Currently, she lives in Santa Ana. She retired in 2016 after a decade as an instructor in communications and media studies at Santa Ana College.
Freelance credits include articles in Details, Los Angeles Times (book reviews and travel), and the travel lit review column "Great Reads for the Restless" for msnbc.com (1999-2000). Her latest book is Aldous Huxley's Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science (Prometheus Books, distributed by Penguin Random House; release date December 8, 2015). She is also the author of Nostradamus, Vagabond Prophet: A Novel of His Life and Time (Forked Road Press, a 2011 revised edition of Vagabond Prophet, Avon Books, 1983). She is co-author with Jane Parker of Adventures Abroad: Exploring the Travel/Retirement Option (Gateway Books/Globe Pequot, 1991).
Featured Work
Aldous Huxley's Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science
Psychedelics, neuroscience, memoir, and historical biography come together when a journalist finds a lost photograph of Aldous Huxley and discovers a hidden side of the celebrated author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception.
Allene Symons had no inkling that Aldous Huxley was once a friend of her father’s until the summer of 2001 when she discovered a box of her dad’s old photographs.
For years in the 1940s and ‘50s, her father had meticulously photographed human hands in the hope of developing a science of predicting human aptitudes and even mental illness. In the box, along with all the other hand images, was one with the name of Aldous Huxley on the back.
How was it possible for two such unlikely people to cross paths -- her aircraft-engineer father and the famous author? This question sparked a journalist’s quest to understand what clearly seemed to be a little-known interest of Aldous Huxley.
Through interviews, road trips, and family documents, the author reconstructs a time peaking in mid-1950s Los Angeles when Huxley experimented with psychedelic substances, ran afoul of gatekeepers, and advocated responsible use of such hallucinogens to treat mental illness as well as to achieve states of mind called mystical. Because the author’s father had studied hundreds of hands, including those of schizophrenics, he was invited into Huxley’s research and discussion circle.
This intriguing narrative about the early psychedelic era throws new light on one of the 20thcentury’s foremost intellectuals, showing that his experiments in consciousness presaged pivotal scientific research underway today.
