This book won't change the way you think about Leary, but it does reveal, to the extent that anything can, the person behind...
A look at the life of Timothy Leary (1920-1996) through the documents preserved in his archive.
Depending on your point of view, Leary was either a guru or a charlatan. Actually, he was a little bit of both. With Richard Alpert (now known as Ram Dass), he initiated the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960 to research the effect of hallucinogens. A few years later, when he was dismissed from the university, he moved to Millbrook, New York, and helped jump-start the psychedelic movement. As this collection of documents from the archive reminds us, Leary’s story is complex. Indeed, the writings here—including Leary’s notes and commentary as well as correspondence from Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Eldridge Cleaver, and other significant figures—highlight Leary’s belief in consciousness expansion, which he saw as the evolutionary purpose of humanity. Arranged and annotated by Ulrich, who cataloged this material for the New York Public Library, the collection is a mixed bag, and there is little new for readers who already know Leary’s life and work. At the same time, it can be revealing, if also more than a little hagiographic, to see it through primary sources. “Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle,” Leary once said. “Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected.” The advice is unexpectedly pragmatic and, in some ways, speaks to the intentions of the volume, which seeks to operate as a controlled cacophony. “The letters and papers offered in this book,” Ulrich writes in the introduction, “…serve as a unique insight into a period in history that has been obscured by its own myth-making.” The Leary we find here is a version of the one we know already, both con man and visionary. Given the subject, how could it be otherwise?
This book won't change the way you think about Leary, but it does reveal, to the extent that anything can, the person behind the myth.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2646-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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