Total Page : 272
Publisher : HarperOne
Publication Date : 2010 01 01
>> Could have been much better
For some reason the author decided to split the book into sections regarding each of the four main people So for instance there is a section on Ram Dass and then a section on Timothy Leary I really did not like this organization as it make the book seem more like a collection of magazine articles than a book Also the material itself was pretty dry and I feel like I didn t learn that much more than I already knew about these people
>> Underwhelming in the analysis department
I know it s selling well but this is a lightweight book A Wikipedia entry
Although author has much factual material at his disposal and frequently repeats it one wonders at the whereabouts of his editor and pre publication readers there is little in depth analysis or cultural/historical contextualization of the activities in question
Virtually meaningless and trite observations are given too much space and there is tuch reliance on hearsay gossip newspaper accounts and the subjects self serving description when it comes tothe motivations involved These activities these people did not develop in a vacuum and for this material to have meaning beyond the patently obvious it needed to be related in depth to the larger culture and period
That said most readers will learn something of the wacky childish sneaky abusive and often unsavory activities of all four of Lattin s iconic boys The Trickster The Seeker The Healer etc and the grotesqueries of the era in which they made their mark After reading this I disliked both decades even more than when I lived through them
Andrew Weil the porky smug and snakey little health guru and grinnin egoist Tim Leary whom Weil helped to grind into the dirt although Leary did plenty of that himself come off the worse here and it seems deservedly so Their positive qualities are listed by their buds but their nasty behavior screams at the top of its lungs
The author lets others speak but doesn t weigh in himself which might be okay in a feature news story but not in a book that pretends to treat decades of American life It suggests that he just can t get his mind around the whole topic much less its myriad jabbertng parts So he lets the sensationalist descriptions of the subjects self important hair brained behavior in a rather sensational time substitute for depth
I was left hungry for understanding for a sense of the psychology of the main characters not just their nuttiness greed and shallow regrets but how their rather profound losses affected them the suicide of Leary s wife and the death of his daughter are quite lightly treated and how they came to understand their roles and the often faulty assumptions that so defined their lives and times
Lattin is a newspaper religion writer after all not an anthropologist or a sociologist and I m afraid a scholar with years of research under his belt is what was called for here
Perhaps my reading suffered from having just finished Blake Bailey s masterful biography of John Cheever The comparison is of a handful of corn chips eaten on the fly to an eight course meal prepared by a master chef Of course Lattin s book is not cheap it just tastes cheap
I would like to think the subjects of this book deserved better Perhaps some of them did Others I could easily do without In any case it will be a cold day in hell before I read ANYTHING about this crew again
>> Any collection strong in American social history and issues needs this
The Harvard Psychedelic Club tells how three brilliance scholars and one freshman crossed paths in the early sixties at a Harvard psychedelic drug research project and changed American lives and culture The four explored expanded consciousness and their actions set the stage for the 1960s social and spiritual revolution with Timothy Leary as the proponent of LSD Richard Alpert the spiritual seeker Huston Smith the teacher of world religions and Andrew Weil the proponent of alternative healing Any collection strong in American social history and issues needs this
