Timothy Leary A Biography Book

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.