Timothy Leary: A Biography

by Robert Greenfield

For a generation in revolt against authority, "Tune in, turn on, drop out" became a mantra, its popularizer, Dr Timothy Leary, a guru. A charismatic psychologist, he became 1st intrigued, then obsessed by the effects of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s while teaching at Harvard, where he not only encouraged but instituted their experimental use among students & faculty. What began as research into consciousness turned into a mission to alter consciousness itself. He transformed himself from serious social scientist into counterculture shaman, embodying the idealism & the hedonism of an age of revolutionary change. Timothy Leary is the 1st major biography of this controversial postwar figure.
Dreaming of heroes: Springfield, MA, 1920-38
The long gray line: West Point, NY, June 1940-August 41
The Berkeley circle: Berkeley, CA, 1941-58
God & man at Harvard: Cambridge, MA, 1958-63
Xanadu: Millbrook, NY, 1963-68
Come together: CA, 1968-70
Escape & flight: San Luis Obispo, CA, March-September 70
Exile-no silence, no cunning: Algeria, Switzerland, Afghanistan, September 70 to January 73
Folsom Prison blues: CA, January 73-May 76
To live & die in LA: CA, June 76-May 31, 96
Acknowledgments
A Note of Sources
Books & Monographs by Timothy Leary
Endnotes
Index

Genres: Biography, Biography Memoir, Nonfiction, Counter Culture, History, Psychology, Spirituality

699 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

A former Associate Editor of the London bureau of Rolling Stone magazine, Robert Greenfield is the critically acclaimed author of several classic rock books, among them S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones, as well as the definitive biographies of Timothy Leary and Ahmet Ertegun. With Bill Graham, he is the co-author of Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out, which won the ASCAP- Deems Taylor Award. An award winning novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, his short fiction has appeared in GQ, Esquire, and Playboy magazines. He lives in California.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book actually erred on the side of being too thorough. I don't want to know what people had for lunch or breakfast. I'm not using that as an idiom, specific meal contents are listed more than once.
I didn't really know much about Timothy Leary beyond, "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and I learned an awful lot about how he could very possibly be the most selfish and self-absorbed person I've heard about in awhile. It was a little hard to keep going at points because of how unlikeable Leary is.

[Clay · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very thorough biography of a man that is often mythologized. I knew some about Leary, but not very much, and I am fascinated by people who describe themselves as prophetic. Furthermore, I am interested in American history in general and the Beat movement and counterculture that took place from the 50's to the 70's. All of those fascinations lead me to this book.

In short, I was not disappointed. I learned much about Leary and the times when he was most popular.
At the end of the book it seems like his life was mostly about finding fame, and not about any particular message. He bounced around from ideal to ideal trying to constantly remain in the limelight. After all is said and done, he is kind of just a charismatic ass hole who may of had some decent ideas at first but never stayed sober long enough to examine his message critically.

Here are just a few things that I learned about Leary that I did not know previously.

1. One of his early experiments with psilocybin involved giving it to prisoners in hopes of rehabilitating them.

2. That he escaped from prison and lived as a fugitive in Algeria for a while.

3. After his prison escape he became politically vocal (something he discouraged previously) and even encouraged militant revolt.

4. Spent time in prison a second time where he briefly was in a cell next door to Charles Manson.

5. He turned into a snitch for the FBI to shorten his prison stay.

6. When he finally got out of prison he was in the witness protection program for a while and lived in the Pecos Wilderness near Santa Fe, NM.

7. While in NM he sought a job and UNM and at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, but was unsuccessful.

8. Some of his ashes were shot into space when he died. (He was obsessed with space travel after he got out of prison for the second time)

9. Earlier in life he inspired the Beatles song Come Together during a conversation with John Lennon.

10. His "autobiography", Flashbacks, is filled with inaccuracies and outright fiction in some instances.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never realized how reckless and unhinged Leary was, but this book is still a fascinating tale of a rebel-pioneer asea in a changing world. His insights into the psychology of the incarcerated seem perceptive.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an absolutely fascinating book to listen to. It covers the sprawling history of this man's astonishing life in a lot of detail, and is therefore not just a book about a brilliant, multi-faceted, flawed human being, but a must-read for anyone interested in what really went down in the 1960s counter-culture. The colorful parade of characters who were major players in that time (and later on) is endless, and I read with great interest as famous writers, radicals, musicians, high society types, philosophers, great beauties, and leading scientists all made appearances, along with a good number of people who are not household names. The book is over-stuffed with juicy gossip, wit, outrageous personalities, politics, and jaw-dropping occurrences of many kinds. If the 1960s was a three-ring circus, then Leary, while not exactly its ringleader, was very much in the center ring.

It is however, a little short on serious thought. Leary was a highly regarded psychologist who did some significant work. He clearly believed that psychedelic drugs had the power to revolutionized human consciousness in a positive way. And while he may have been a little too messianic in the way he went about things, enough so that the authorities made putting him behind bars a top priority, I would wager that he was a more thoughtful individual than the attention-seeking, celebrity-loving partyboy that Greenfield portrays him as. This biographer clearly did not think very highly of his subject, and one gets the impression that he comes at this from the perspective of a regular middle-class guy who (and he is not alone in this to be sure) takes a very dim view of prancing characters like Leary who thumb their noses at mainstream propriety. Greenfield does make a convincing case, based on what appears to be very extensive research, that Leary was a self-centered, lying showboat who had a highly negative impact on those close to him. But even a biographer who despises him cannot hide the fact that Leary was a charismatic and courageous leader who inspired many to try new ways of living, and who paid dearly for his outspokenness.

He was a lousy dad and a guy who sold out his former comrades to get himself sprung from jail, it is hard to deny it. But it is impossible to deny that Leary affected the lives of millions - it was a negative effect in some cases for sure - and that his life was one of the wildest and most kaleidascopic lives probably anyone has ever had, and that it makes for great reading and listening (Lawlor does a solid job in the audio version I listened to, telling it pretty straight and broadcast news-like). So when is Oliver Stone going to do the movie version?

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tim Leary was on the fringes of my awareness during the sixties and beyond. I'd read his scientific papers in preparation for a report delivered in a high school public speaking class, but not much else. He, like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, I saw as a jokester, not to be taken very seriously after he left Harvard.

This biography, purportedly the first serious effort in that regard, confirms that initial impression. Leary does not come off at all well. Rather, his seems another story of an ordinary middle class guy going off the rails--and not very amusingly--to pursue, as the bible puts it, the fleshpots of Babylon.

Leary, if Greenfield is to be believed, was an opportunistic narcissist without a moral center, immersed in deceits which led to ultimate self-deceit. Leary was also a cultural icon, conncected in very many ways to the elites of the West. His depravity reflects theirs and vice versa.

One thing lacking from this book is any concrete sense as to how so many could have gotten so inspired by psychedelics. Here, Aldous Huxley still serves.

[Daniel Lovins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written, filled with interesting details about Leary and the turbulent times in which he lived.Not all of it's pretty, of course.His personal life for example. His first wife (out of 5) killed herself with car exhaust after witnessing Leary and his mistress discuss a possible tryst. Leary's adult daughter accused him of sexually molesting her and her brother as children, was arrested for defecating in a laundromat washing machine, arrested again for shooting her boyfriend in the back of the head, and then, while in prison, hanged herself with a shoelace. When Leary began turning state's evidence against former associates in 1974, his son Jack declared at a press conference that his father "would inform on anybody he can to get out of jail and it would not surprise me if he would testify about my sister or myself if he could"(p. 507).Nevertheless, Leary's son from a later marriage recently wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review criticizing Greenfield for writing "ultimately a false representation of a good man ... My 18 years of living with Leary as a son was ultimately a beautiful experience." Being "a good man" is obviously in the eye of the beholder. Leary certainly left behind a wide swath of destruction. After escaping prison and landing in Algeria in 1970, for example, Leary went on the record urging the Weather Underground and others to "escalate the violence, they should start hijacking planes, they should kidnap prominent sports figures and television and Hollywood people in order to free Bobby Seale and in order to free John Sinclair"(p. 415). Like him or not, reading about Leary's various adventures in academia, altered states of consciousness, communal living, and politics (he once ran for governor of California) is quite entertaining. Greenfield vividly reconstructs encounters with G. Gordon Liddy (the Watergate burglar who eventually became Leary's debating partner), Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy, Aldous Huxley, Alfred Hofmann (inventor of LSD), Michael Hollingshead (who once drilled a hole in his own head and who introduced Leary to LSD), Jack Kerouac, Jerry Garcia, Ken Kesey, Eldridge Cleaver, and many other interesting characters.Definitely worth reading.

[Matthew K · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read, mostly because Leary's life is an interesting lens through which to examine many important socio-cultural-political happenings of 21st-century America (WWII, radical elements of the 60s, Vietnam, the search for cultural relevance in the 70s and 80s), particularly because he always seemed to surround himself with a cast of high-profile characters.

However, after reading this book, I realized he's not relevant because he did anything important, but rather because he's a narcissist who needed to be the center of everyone's attention. Even his shameless advocacy of LSD was just a cry for attention—he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

[Cypress Butane · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing biography. Timothy Leary led an enigmatic, deep, and complex life. Greenfield tells the story of that life from his parentage to the end, and is a serious trip, but not a heavy one. This lengthy book genuinely does the man justice, paying heed to both the tabloid nature of much of his time on earth, while not trivializing what he stood for in the most far out moments of his personal psychedelic quest. And though he was a major media figure and the book covers all of this with insight and interesting detail, it also grounds him ultimately in his human relationships. An amazing book.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engrossing account of a remarkable & often awful life, I found it repellent & fascinating. Leary was a sort of cult leader, and if he'd been from a different socio-economic group he could have been a Manson. His intense self-absorption brought him rewards but also in some ways destroyed his life. He's typical of a certain breed of American mid-century 'alpha' type. The type of person dramatic things happen around, but - for the most part - he survives & others close to him suffer.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly detailed work on the biography of a sociopathic psychologist who became one of the most unusual cult figures around.

I remember one person telling me they read Leary's Autobiography, and they never could answer:
a. Why his wife committed suicide
b. Why no one spoke to him at West Point

And i thought it was so fascinating that they seemed lost at explaining those facets of 'rejection'

[Becky Loader · Rating 2 out of 5]

I now know more about Tim Leary than I need to know.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't blame the messenger. Kindly read my review, and not just the stars (I'd mark about 3.4 if I could; I rounded off) before you rate its helpfulness. It'd be a thoughtful gesture for all those who have entered the fray and who (I trust) have actually read the book carefully. This does not mean you agree or disagree with my own ranking, simply that a review assisted you in better judging the work under scrutiny. Such care, as Leary would have I expect emphasized, needs to be given to ideas and people that we may at first react to cautiously or with fear. This care also goes for those of us reviewing who have taken the considerable time and effort to read Greenfield's weighty biography. Greenfield himself, in taking up such a figure lionized or lambasted, shows also considerable courage, and chutzpah.

I admit having been completely neutral coming to this biography. To me, Leary's another once-famous/infamous guru better known to the generation previous to mine. I was still a child during the hey-day of Leary in the late 60s, so I have neither freak flag to fly nor ax to grind.

Often, as with the trials and the endless rigamarole that Leary and the Feds and the informers and ex-paramours and radicals and media all conspired to drag Leary's saga into the 70s and beyond, the book drags considerably. Greenfield's considerable primary and secondary research has been picked apart predictably, and perhaps this is inevitable; however, I admit that his credentials as a chronicler of this era (such as an oral bio of Jerry Garcia and "Bear" aka Owsley Stanley: both by me recently reviewed on GR) do place him arguably as well as any "mainstream" writer could be expected to approach this complicated man. As divisive as was Leary's effect on his times and his audience, the bitter debate over Greenfield's estimation of his shape-shifting subject seems inescapable.

I found this book more poignant than it may seem from the harsh reactions recorded here by some fellow readers. Particularly well handled, for example, are the fate of poor Susan, his troubled wife Marianne, his other manipulated and/or opportunistic lovers, Jack's difficult childhood, and Art Linkletter's unwanted role as bete noire to Leary, if in a less lucrative set-up than that enjoyed by Leary with Liddy.

The confusion of the Algerian years, the manipulation in Switzerland, the comedy of errors in getting busted on the Mexican border/ no man's land: all show well the predicament of Leary's rebellion. Not by accident was he jailed next to Manson by a calculating administration. Such antagonistic positions --literally and symbolically--stranded him within his time and space. The italicized vignettes that delve into what he may have been thinking are deployed sparingly, only three times--as a boy in confession, as a plebe at West Point, and most movingly, as it imagines Leary awaiting death--for once without his devoted acolytes and eagerly attentive coterie around him--in his Hollywood Hills home.

These (terse yet eloquent) departures from fact had been critiqued by the NY Times along with the negative emphasis on Leary's failings in raising his children, keeping his marriages/ partnerships intact, and his tendency to cut and run rather than stay and face the consequences of his actions. Jack Leary responded with hurt in a letter on behalf of "the Millbrook Foundation" to the NY Times Book Review. But, the vignettes do seem to have been re-created from what Leary wrote and/or those who could corroborate his frame of mind at such formative stages. Jack complained that Greenfield in his determination to assassinate Leary's character accentuated the negative and left out the positive. In fact, his son's letter made me want to read the book so I could judge for myself.

The grand hopes that Leary sought to usher into reality by the psychedelic revolution and the grim fate of those unable to keep up with the bewildering pace set by this relentlessly elusive Pied Piper both receive their share of Greenfield's attention. Leary does emerge as one unable or unwilling to take the blame for those who became acid casualties. He is cited as saying this guilt would be like charging Einstein with the damage done by the atom bomb, a provocative response worth debating.

Greenfield does strive to credit Leary with his leadership, but through so many quotes from Leary's admittedly "creative" musings published by a generous press in the 60s and 70s, he does manage subtly to undermine the pedestal upon which millions placed their celebrated Dr. Leary. One telling example is the flyer with which Leary publicized Jack's gone missing after the Laguna drug bust. It captures the simple love of an often absent father, the guilt of a very intelligent man who should have been a better parent, and the desperate desire to break free for himself and his son from the conventional mores and legal restrictions that hounded Leary and his family remorselessly.

On the other hand, Leary's ravenous intake of massive doses of chemicals even as his health wore down does make you wonder how he could keep up his mental and physical stamina so long given what he put his mind and his body through for four decades. Leary's ingestive powers astonished me. Maybe part of the difficulty in following his idealistic (and it seems quite expensive) path was that few could sustain such a consumption of substances for long without their mind and/or body giving in. Leary seemed both to succumb and to resist, the drug explorer combined with the psychological researcher perhaps inextricably, from the mid-1950s to the mid-90s. In the process, he carried exhilarated millions along with him while thousands less enchanted vowed to hunt him down. Yes, social and political contexts are left less fully explicated about the radical vs. the cultural left, but this book is long enough as it is without having to develop into a miniature history of the complex upheavals of the Sixties.

One minor but persistently damaging flaw: the shortage of photos. Often, Greenfield describes with great detail snapshots that he has seen to make clearer his understanding of Leary's personae and his relationships and how he characterized himself before the public eye as well as in more intimate moments. All such remarks are conveyed well, but why so few photos? Perhaps the estate of Leary had fought with Greenfield? This book could have greatly benefited from such pictorial examples, as perhaps 50 such photos should have received their proper place in the chapter headings. Only a handful of photographs are in fact found there, and no photo spreads are placed within the pages, unlike most biographies from popular presses of modern figures caught in the eye of the camera. In an era so dependent on the poster, the gesture, the album cover, the AP photo on the newspaper's front page, the film clip on the evening news: why then such a paucity of illustration?

Within our contemporary limits of biography in a litigious decade and a jealously guarded legacy, Greenfield has sought to portray as accurately as he could, with years of interviews and research, his take on a complicated, fragile, delusive, and imaginative pioneer "psychonaut." Whether Leary proves a success or failure may depend ultimately on a generation who decides his legacy after those with whom Leary prickled, posed, postured, and preached have also departed this world. It will take decades before the cosmic dust that he kicked up has settled. In the meantime, Greenfield, whether or not you agree with his perspective, has taken a brave first step by taking a figure seen to have been on the fringe and taking him onto center stage. You need not to have been converted to benefit from this revival of one man's messianic mission.

[Doug Shidell · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this comprehensive look at Timothy Leary's private and public life, Leary comes across as intelligent, charismatic, ego centric and unabashedly hedonistic. It's a dangerous combination as Leary regularly shifts gears, discards old friends and, in a blatant attempt to get out of jail early, snitches on those who helped him the most. He turns his back on the drug addled 1960s counterculture that he promoted and benefitted from. He hurt those who loved him the most, ignored evidence that countered his narrative about the positive impact of mind altering drugs, probably drove his daughter to suicide and abandoned his messed up son.

Greenfield is a thorough biographer and although he doesn't cast Leary in a sympathetic light, he strives hard to present the man as accurately as the evidence suggests. He does a good job of showing how others, friends and foes, interact with Leary, both for their own needs and for Leary's.

The book is well written and moves along at a steady pace, but the amount of detail is staggering. There is nothing wrong with that, but I realized that I didn't like Leary or much of anything he stood for, so I was torn between following a good read and simply wanting to be done with a character I couldn't relate to on any level. This isn't the fault of the biographer or the editor. In fact, it shows the strength of the book that I kept reading despite my disgust with the man portrayed in the biography.

[Joseph Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timothy Leary: An Experimental Life by Robert Greenfield (audiobook unabridged version). This was a long engrossing biography about the 60's LSD guru who helped bring psychedelics to the masses. Leary may be the most controversial figure to emerge from the hippie movement, Leary started as a serious Clinical Psychologist and Harvard Professor. Introduced to psychedelic drugs by a colleague Leary was interested in clinical studies on the subject. What started out as professional science slowly degraded into madness, debauchery, tragedy and pseudoscience especially when he shifted from Mescaline to the more hallucinogenic LSD. What ensued was drug busts, traveling adventures, suicides, prison breaks and alliances with revolutionary groups like the Weatherman and Black Panther Party. Rock groups idolized Leary, Lennon wrote "Come Together" and The Moody Blues wrote "Timothy Leary is Dead" for Leary, Jimi Hendrix wrote and performed for Leary's only musical album. Leary appeared to be a sociopath which was evident in his close relationships, he never showed interest in his own children even when his only daughter killed herself, he was constantly chasing a good time and did so at the cost of the people that surrounded him. I found him to be extremely flawed and brilliant at the same time. He definitely lead and interesting life.

[Claude · Rating 3 out of 5]

A must read for fools that idolise Timothy Leary without really knowing what kind of person he is.
The start part of the book where they explain his family history is a bit boring. It's a fairly lukewarm read until you get up to the part where he is working at Harvard and experimenting with drugs actually. I found it to be a worthwhile read as it confirmed my suspicions that Tim Leary was a dick, (just like Che Guevara if you actually get to know the facts from his life). It is also interesting to read because of the large number of celebrities that Tim met in his life. I am astounded at how so many celebrities that I thought were wise human beings seemed to like him. maybe he was utterly charming in person, so it made his flaws bearable. I suppose we all have flaws.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great biography! Really engaging from beginning to end...Leary was a very charismatic person, someone you'd love to hang out with, but definitely a narcissist and a horrible father. I'm waiting for the movie...Tim Robbins as Leary??? Leary was everywhere...on stage at Altamont, in bed with Yoko and John, escaped prison with the help of the Weather Underground then ended up in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver, in prison next to Manson. A fascinating read!

[Shadesohd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Timothy Leary is a total huckster--a very pathetic figure. However, the story of his life provides a unique perspective on many fascinating currents of 20th century American history.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Captivating.

[Katelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating biography written by a journalist who not only interviewed Timothy Leary but was also well read in the source material. Assertion from the author's note is that someone claimed that people who loved Leary would not like the book and people who hated him would not read it. As I am not in either camp, I found it comprehensive as a biography, covering every intimate detail of an adventurous life. At times sympathetic and others appalling: Timothy Leary the imperfect human, living his life to the fullest in the best way he chose.

[Laurie AH · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a slog, but fascinating. So many details, and I had a hard time keeping track of all the people, names, chronology, and how events connected to one another. But still, all the crazy came through loud and clear. And what a complete showboat and manipulative asshole TL was. I wished there was more focus on Rosemary, but I appreciate the sweet dedication to her at the end - and the last sentence did make me laugh out loud.

[John Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is well written and gives a view of Dr. Leary that is not always in the best light, so I felt it was fair, thus the 4 stars. That said, Timothy Leary was very selfish and dishonest, as my experience with those in the drug culture has been. After reading, I feel he led a shameful and empty life. He hurt more people than he helped.

[Joshua Crawford · Rating 4 out of 5]

It appears as though the author lacks sympathy for the subject, but what a crazy story this is.

[treva · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very good. Thorough, detailed, and very unbiased. Christ, what an asshole.

[JW · Rating 4 out of 5]

A critical biography of LSD’s prophet. Portrays Leary as a charming, self-absorbed hedonist. Perhaps Leary would have agreed with that portrayal and called it a strength, not a weakness?

[Todd Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timothy Leary was a psychologist, Harvard Professor and counter-cultural figure in the 1960s who gained fame through his promotion of psychedelic drugs as tools for the expansion of consciousness. After becoming embroiled in legal battles and serving prison time in the 70s, Leary became a lecturer and futurist in later life, becoming interested in human life extension, computers and space colonization. He died in 1996.

I always thought of Leary as an interesting figure, and saw him speak back when I was in college in the early 90s during his stand-up philosopher / futurist phase (his talk got me interested in the writing of William Gibson at the time). He had a legacy connecting him to numerous cultural icons and had a flare for originality that resulted in several phrases that have made themselves into the collective lexicon (most notably “Turn on, tune in, drop out”).

With that as a background, I have to say that Timothy Leary: A Biography portrayed him in a less than flattering light. Greenfield depicts Leary as irresponsible and unethical in both his professional life as an academic and as a popular figure. A hedonist with the personality of a cult leader and a flare for self-promotion, Leary (whose weight of opinion was based on his academic credentials) abandoned all objective integrity early on in his career in his enthusiasm for physical pleasure and personal aggrandizement. In his wake, he left arrests, broken marriages, child neglect (potentially abuse) and suicides. By setting himself up as a self-appointed leader of a movement and recklessly promoting illegal drug use, he also created a backlash that helped damage any hope for a rational national drug policy.

With that said, I do think the book focused almost entirely on the negative aspects of Leary’s life and overlooked or minimized the positive aspects of his message. A search of YouTube will pull up some interesting interviews in which he discusses a variety of topics.

Leary’s legacy will likely be mixed, at best, but he certainly led a wild life and Greenfield did a nice job turning it into an interesting, if negative, book.

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book on a very interesting figure. Timothy Leary is the kind of person who everyone who lived through the 60's thinks they know and everyone who didn't has heard of but doesn't bother knowing. This book tracks the amazing, disturbing and often times sad life of Timothy Leary and the role he played in making the 60's. The writing is nothing to write home about, but it is well-researched.

[Josef · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unflinching look at the text and sub-text of the real life human being known as Timothy Leary. Again, this bio pulls no punches and reveals what we all know by personal experience, but rarely attribute to the human beings paraded as "celebrities" to us via the many media channels perpetually surrounding our eyes and ears, that is, flawed, but real humanity. I personally enjoyed the parts dealing with the actual, scientific study and experimentation with the hallucinogenic, chemical properties of Mushrooms and of course Ab Hoffman's wunderstuff, LSD25. The long, slogging, journey from deeply flawed curious inquirer after truth, to the feeble, broken Shaman, only able to hear the voices in his own mental echo-chamber is a stiff-drink to be sure, but in reality no tougher than what one would encounter if they read a bio on any one of us, which again leads me back to my first sentence. He was more than all the low-calorie, psychedelic esoterica,(ie. Gnosticism and ancient Pharmacopeia wrapped in 1960's counter-cultural nomenclature). He was a human being.

[Bruce Roderick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was one of those books that I bought with no intention of reading immediately but did plan on reading eventually. I had just finished Tom Wolf's THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST and was reading a bit of Hunter S. Thomson's work at the time that I bought this, so I was very interested in knowing more about Leary. My only concern would was whether or not this book would glorify Leary because I only wanted to know about Leary. Despite being a big fan of Thompson's (although I don't agree with him 100% either) I didn't want to read someone philosophize about the brilliance and this book didn't do that.

It spoke volumes about who Leary was, the influence he had on a generation, and just portrayed him a very neutral light and let his actions and results of his behavior speak for themselves -which only subsequently lead to portraying him in a negative light.

VERY GOOD BOOK! I highly recommend it!

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having read many of Timothy Leary's books, as well as the "Flashbacks" auto-bio, I was initially excited to read this book.

Unfortunately, it seems as if Greenfield (who supposedly met Leary in 1970) was under contract to write a hatchet job. Leary's faults and foibles, of which he did seem to have many, get highlighted and his achievements deliberately get undermined or given back-handed praise.

I slogged through the whole book, but ultimately found it a bit depressing and tabloid-like. Don't get me wrong - I don't think a book praising Leary to the rafters would do the man justice either. It would be nice to have a balanced analysis of this often misunderstood and complex critter.

If you're not familiar with Leary but would like to learn about him, I would suggest avoiding this bio and go for the John Higgs book ("I Have America Surrounded")instead.

[Kalma Piponius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some have complained that this book concentrates too much on Leary's negative sides. I think biography should be critical on its object and if it's not its a dissapointment. Leary's life included probably so much content that even with this many pages it can't be contained there but only partly. For example his later theories, like 8-circuit conciousness -model, is not mentioned at all - maybe thought as too outrageous. It's obvious that his family life suffered from his hedonistic and messianic life style. As it's also obvious that he was not unfallible. He wanted to be happy and positive and didn't think too much of everyday realities. All in all pretty good book, I think. If someone wants to know more about his theories, he/she should look for some place else.