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Dr. Timothy Leary was one of the most controversial and divisive figures of the twentieth century. President Nixon called him ‘the most dangerous man in the world.’ Hunter S. Thompson said that he was ‘not just wrong, but a treacherous creep and a horrible goddamn person.’ Yet the writer Terence McKenna claims that he ‘probably made more people happy than anyone else in history,’ and William Burroughs wrote that ‘he changed the world, but it may be another 100 years before he is accorded his rightful stature.’
Leary was a brilliant Harvard psychologist who was sacked from his research post because of his research into LSD and other psychedelic drugs. He went on to become the global figurehead of the 1960s drug culture, coined the phrase “tune in, turn on and drop out”, and persuaded millions of people to take drugs and explore alternative lifestyles. His scandalous research led to irreversible changes in social and cultural fields as diverse as popular music, cyber-culture, the Mind-Body-Soul movement and clinical psychological profiling. Yet the impact of his work has been so controversial that it has completely overshadowed the man himself and the details of his life. Few people realise that Timothy Leary’s life is one of the greatest untold adventure stories of the twentieth century.
He was jailed in California in 1970 and promptly escaped by shimmying along a telephone cable over the prison fence. He was kidnapped by armed revolutionaries and was rescued by terrorists. He was blackmailed by an exiled arms dealer and imprisoned on four continents. He betrayed the ‘drug culture’ by collaborating with the FBI, and he came close to murdering two US Government officers. He was chased around the world, from the Algerian Kasbah to European High Society, with the highest bail in human history on his head and the US Attorney General snapping at his heals. Yet throughout his adventures his life remained a hedonistic blur of drugs and orgies, and his friends included John Lennon, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Timothy Leary led a life of unflagging optimism and reckless devotion to freedom. It was, in the words of his goddaughter Winona Ryder, ‘not just epic grandeur but flat-out epic grandeur.’ This will be the first time that the full story of that life is told.
book reviews
- MixMag, June 06 (4 Stars)
"Enthralling" - dailygrail.com
"Excellent" - Metro, June 28th 06 (4 stars)
"Following the recent publication of Robert Greenfield's exhaustive account of Leary, British journalist John Higgs casts a cooler eye over the extraordinary life of someone who was much more than a turn on, tune in, drop out soundbite. More an engaging cultural history than a judgement on his personality, a sure-footed grounding for the mud-slinging that's sure to come when two planned biopics hit the screen."
- reFRESH issue 39
"A remarkable account of a remarkable man"
- Robert Elms, BBC Radio London, July 5th 2006
"An absolutely fascinating book" - Weed World, June 06
"You will not want to put this book down - full of unbelievable, gripping adventures - get it!" - dogmatika.com
"an exhilarating read, a stellar piece of work, a must-have"
- The Beat, May 06
"a fascinating book about an extraordinary subject"
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