A thorough, sternly bemused biography.
The lurid, yet strangely naïve life of the Harvard psychologist and LSD guru.
Rock writer Greenfield (Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia, not reviewed) is not easily snowed by his subject’s Faustian antics, and he dances often over the question of whether or not Timothy Leary (1920–96) sold his soul for fame. Leary’s early years growing up Catholic in Springfield, Mass., were marked by his drunken father’s desertion and his attempts to please his mother. Shenanigans involving alcohol and girls got him bounced out of West Point and other schools, until he settled down and married Marianne Busch. At Berkeley, Leary did his formative doctoral study and research in clinical psychology, breaking with behaviorism by “classifying social interaction as a game, one which subjects could not only be taught to play but also coached to win.” Constantly at the center of a partying entourage that included successive wives (Marianne hanged herself in 1955) and his two utterly unsupervised children, Leary was invited to Harvard in 1958 to help bolster the faltering psychology department founded by William James in 1875. Tripping on mescaline while in Mexico, he segued into research with psilocybin, sanctioned by venerable authorities Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond, and the Harvard Psychedelic Project took flight. LSD, then gaining currency thanks to “divine messenger” Michael Hollingshead, became the drug of choice, and Leary embarked on a messianic mission to spread the drug’s wondrous, mind-blowing magic. Fired from Harvard, he established tripped-out communes in New York and California, attracting hordes of hippies before the drug busts. Greenfield is levelheaded when discussing Leary’s uneasy relationship with politics, nor does he soft-pedal Leary’s betrayals of friends and colleagues. His last 20 years seeking new cosmic causes (e.g., space migration) are covered by the author with a kind of filial indulgence.
A thorough, sternly bemused biography.Pub Date: June 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-100500-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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