Customer Reviews

The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The story of Ram Dass/Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary is well-documented. But the new news in this extremely readable and enjoyable book is how the psychedelic tendrils that emanated from Cambridge in the early 1960s also included an MIT professor who would become the foremost expert on comparative religion (Huston Smith) and an ambitious Harvard freshman who would become the most successful exponent of alternative medicine -- Andrew Weil. How these four lives intersected, how they supported and betrayed one another, makes for fascinating reading. But what gives this book its heft is the fact that Lattin lets us know what happened to these men in the subsequent 50 years, how they feel now about what they went through then, and what the social and political implications are of the revolution they helped to foment and promote.

Lattin understands that the key conflict in the 1960s wasn't so much between those who took LSD and those who didn't, but rather between those who felt that the revolution would occur if enough people took psychedelics and re-calibrated their perceptions; as opposed to those who felt that change would happen only if enough people agitated and protested, radically altering political and social structures. Lattin also understands that among those who took a great deal of LSD, there were two main outcomes: having been exposed to mystical/psychotic experiences, you either looked for ways to change your life according to what you'd seen and learned while on psychedelics; or you got hooked on the high itself, trying to repeat that experience as often and intensely as possible.

The Harvard Psychedelic Club is a wonderful book, full of insight and compassion. It also casts a cold eye on what those events mean when looked at now, 50 years after they occurred.

The psychedelic movement suffers from a public relations problem. Hallucinogens have been lumped into the sloppy category "drugs." Thus, the history the author recounts has been buried under generic rhetoric about the ways misguided people use chemicals in their attempts to "escape" from "reality." Tripping is viewed as comparable to indulging in three-martini lunches, cultivating a deadly crack or heroin habit, or taking prescribed pharmaceuticals to make a high-stress grind tolerable. Apparently it took a religion journalist to state the obvious: misguided or not, at least some users of psychedelics are on a quest to find reality not escape it.

I just finished the book and was struck (though not too surprised) to see reports of formative episodes in the lives of authors and others whose work has influenced me. It was a big "a-ha" to see Jon Kabat-Zinn, Dan Millman, Daniel Goleman, writers who I don't immediately associate with psychedelics, and Mirabai Bush, who led a training I attended, tied to the Fab Four protagonists. The twin lenses of biography and religion are used very effectively. This text paints a vivid picture of how people blessed and cursed with extraordinary intellects responded to the question, "Is this all there is?" when graced with the means to explore it, and how they shared the results of their inquiry with the rest of us mortals. The writing is sharp, fun, and clear with a strong narrative arc. Highly recommended.

An absolutely fascinating account of the American psychedelic movement. I give it 5 stars for readability and research, and I knock it down one star because I disagree with the author's conclusion. But you don't need to agree with the conclusion in order to enjoy this well written and informative book; at the least you will find his thesis thought provoking and not easily dismissed. And if you read the book and agree with Lattin, then you may very well have a 5 star experience!

Don Lattin has done a fine job creating a contemporary reprise/review of the remarkable confluence of influences that occurred in Cambridge, MA, USA in the early 1960s. I personally knew pretty well a lot of the folks he writes about.

Dick Alpert (a.k.a. Baba Ram Dass) was one of my students when I taught karate for the Harvard Athletic Department in the early 1960s. Tim Leary was a long time friend I had met at the old Harvard Center for Research on Personality at 5 Divinity Avenue in 1961 and saw on and off over the years in various contexts. Tim visited with us on (as I recall) his 64th birthday and gave me a copy of a book by William S. Burroughs that Bill had given to Tim shortly before, inscribing it to him as an "old comrade in arms". (I'd first met Burroughs at Tim's house on Homer Street in Newton, MA in 1962 or so, while Bill was visiting there). Andrew Weil was a classmate (Harvard '64) though not a friend. I attended various of Houston Smith's lectures in those days, too, though I did not know him personally.

Many (perhaps most even) of the other folks mentioned in the book are also people I knew back in the '60s and '70s. Don's book does a great job conveying some of the extraordinary flavor of those remarkable times. It is a splendid introduction to this most peculiar and interesting nexus of American history for younger folks and a great 'flashback' document for all the Baby Boomers I watched tripping their way through the 60s and '70s as well!

Get this book and read it. You will enjoy it. *;-)

This is a very informative book on the history of LSD's widespread use. This is a must read for any one that grew up in the 60's. I was amazed to find out about the people involved. It was hard to put down the book,

Maybe its because I am a native Californian, but I loved the book. An no I have never done drugs, or been into the lifestyles of those in the book. Simply like reading books about interesting people.

While I knew some of the information shared, I think it was the combination of the four people discussed that made the book more interesting. Timothy Leary and Ram Dass who was so new age he was boring tome wasn't of much interest to me until I read this book and discovered he had had a stroke which had made him 'more human'. Huston Smith because of his religious writings while at U C Berkeley were something I enjoyed as I did the information on Andrew Weil who before reading this book, seems so low key, common sense mode. He still is, but I never knew of his extensive activities at Harvard.It was reading of Richard Alpert that is so dang interesting.

It's the Afterword that is really, really interesting.

I was going to rate this book four stars with deference to over all readership, knowing why I liked it so much and thinking how my wife for instance wouldn't be as riveted or even choose it over other material, but then this is my review and I ripped through the book in less than a day and I don't read that fast. In reading these reviews I feel some folks expect too much. This book is entertaining and useful. I'm no judge of whether this is a scholarly work, but it has a place of great value as a window into the history of an era which is difficult to really capture. From my biased perspective, Mr. Lattin seems to have done journeyman's work capturing the times.

H.P.C. was informative both historically and anecdotally with regard to both the potential benefits and the hazards of psychedelic drug use. It gave a back story which entertained me as a person who road that there horse and got some bruises before I lept from the saddle to safety. I will never take back what I learned from my psychotropic encounters but my first acid trip was at age 14 ( in 1969) and I must say one shouldn't try to kill their ego before it's not fully formed. In that respect I seriously consider this book a useful handbook for any youth who is drawn to experimenting with psychedelics and I recommend the book to parents in that context, especially those who are not initiated but worry for their own kids. I've been honest with our children to the point of telling war stories because I am still in awe of having survived my own youth ( or have I?), but in doing so risk glorifying stupid behavior, so I view this as a a very useful tool for objective education.

I liked Lattin's idea to bundle these four stories together. I only knew of Weil as that bearded guy on PBS lectures. After this read I'm no more impressed with the man, but I am glad to have a better knowledge of Weils works and their context in the culture. Only last year I found myself in a Berkeley restaurant where I strained to eavesdrop as a very old and frail Huston Smith regaling a couple seated with him, with great Huston Smith stories. What a treat. As a casual student of religious philosophy and what is truly useful about the psychedelic experience, Smith has become my hero and go to guy, and that notion is happily re-enforced by this book. What a neat guy, and now a sweet old man. To me as a young "seeker", Richard Alpert, AKA Ram Dass, Baba Dick, Dick Das, etc. was a hero and icon, and somebody whose path I have crossed a time or two. But with time I've taken the man off his pedestal. I know the guy has done some great work with SEVA foundation etc, but I was blown away that after all that mentoring by his guru, even Ram Das struggles with forgiveness when it comes to Andy Weil ( see the book for details). Referring back to "death of ego" touted by Leary and company, if Lattin's descriptions of Leary are right ( and those in the new book "Orange Sunshine" which align with Lattin's telling) Leary's ego was such a fortress as to be impervious to the atomic bomb that is LSD. Even Ram Das laments in the book that on his death bed Leary was unable to really embrace his physical death at the end. How ironic since early LSD experiments were on patients who were dieing. Was all that LSD actually wasted on the guy! Shee-it!

When I first saw The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin., I thought, "OH, NO! Not another reshash of old hash. Give us a break!" The "club" or course, was not an actual social organization, but Lattin's metaphor for how his four main characters interwove their lives.



However, I was greatly surprised, informed, and entertained by Club. Lattin is a lively, skilled story-teller and adds details, especially interpersonal ones, that have been missing so far as I know. His four members of the club are Ram Dass, Leary, Andrew Weil, and Huston Smith. While Smith was not so active in the club as the other three, thanks to his international renown, his Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals may turn out to be the most influential psychedelic book in religion. Including Smith may show Lattin's interest as a former religion writer too.



This quartet, according to Lattin, "did nothing less than inspire a generation of Americans to redefine the nature of reality" (p. 214) and their historical importance "is not so much any particular vision, but the very process of envisioning: (p. 215).



Lattin is clear that he "recreates" his numerous dialogues, and in the front matter says when possible he checked his reconstructions with at least one person who took part in the various conversations.



I do strongly recommend The Harvard Psychedelic Club as a window into personality sketches of four significant people of the times, their interactions, and their continuing influence into this century.



Tom Roberts
(Ed)Psychedelic Medicine Psychedelic Medicine [Two Volumes]: New Evidence for Hallucinogenic Substances as Treatments
Psychedelic Horizons Psychedelic Horizons (Societas)
Psychoactive Sacramentals: Essays on Entheogens and Religion (The Csp Entheogen Project Series, 3)

Self-Promotion Pays! Or 'How the Self Promoters Write History'. That might be the title of a book I'll never have time to write.

The four central personages of "The Harvard Psychedelic Club" were and still are among the most ardent self-promoters of modern times, as author Don Lattin sporadically discloses. Huston Smith, whom Lattin calls "the teacher"; Richard Alpert, "the seeker'; Timothy Leary, "the trickster"; and Andrew Weil, "the healer" are all portrayed by Lattin as deeply flawed individuals -- and that's accurate enough -- as highly influential personages -- and that's certainly true, as far as it goes -- and as Shiva-like meldings of destruction and creation. The extent of their megalomania is obvious, but when the original Narcissus stared at his reflection in the still pool, perhaps the face he beheld was truly as handsome as he thought. Lattin himself is of an age, of the `baby boomer' generation, to have been impacted by the activities of all four. In researching this book, he interviewed three of them (Leary is dead), as well as many of their families and associates. He plainly reveres three of them, and keeps a window open for reverence along with disapprobation for the fourth. He doesn't beatify them, however. Given the record of their personal lives, beatification would be utter fantasy.

But there was no "Harvard Psychedelic Club" in an explicit organizational sense. Lattin's use of this disingenuous title for his book is purely an opportunistic publisher's ploy to sensationalize the subject and to cash in on the iconic status of Harvard University in American culture. Really, this is a group biography of the four persons mentioned. All of them were active at Harvard in the early 1960s -- I was there also and knew three of them fairly well, especially my classmate Andy Weil -- but less than a third of the book examines their conjunction at Harvard. The bulk of the text pursues their much longer later careers, through the decades of the `70s and `80s right up to the present.

In the Afterword of the book, Lattin declares: "This book was not about me..." That may be the most inaccurate statement in the whole text. In fact, the whole book is implicitly about Lattin, about his perception of the effect these four men and the `movement' associated with their names had on his life. Lattin is narcissist enough to consider his own life as emblematic of his generation, of the flower children baby boomers now approaching the stage of lif when memoirs seem suitable. Like most baby boomers, Lattin sees himself as a majority phenomenon, a perspective that limits the authenticity of his research and the perspicacity of his book. He's a journalist; you won't be able to ignore that fact as you read his jaunty pop prose. At his worst, he's glib. His special niche as a journalist is important; he's the Religion writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. "Spirituality is his bag," as one of his boomer peers might express it. He freely admits as much. He also admits, in his Afterword, his own extensive use of psychedelics and his neverending search for spiritual enlightenment, for some kind of vision of a Power controlling human life and afterlife.

It's the "spiritual quests" of his four subjects than intertwines their lives, in Lattin's account of them. A Freudian biographer might have found their diverse sexual quests central, but Lattin treats their misbehaviors as peripheral to the Big Quest. With these four guys, he may be right. Where he goes amiss or amok, in my opinion, is when he defines his entire generation in the same terms, as spiritually restless and needy. Undoubtably, a portion of the generation - a cadre of hippydom - were Seekers ready to tread in the footprints of Alpert or Smith, but they were not even a plurality. Remember the film "Forrest Gump"? The retarded Gump represented his generation's obsessions in his serial adventures. Civil rights, anti-war, sexual freedom, non-conformity, healthy living, and environmentalism were all formidable obsessions of the generation, but they are scarcely mentioned amid Lattin's account of the religious hunger that he considers the initiation rite into his Psychedelic Club.

I'm not a baby boomer. I'm a few years too old, born before Pearl Harbor. Really, Mr. Lattin, all of us who entered Harvard in 1960 were too old to be boomers or hippies. If we arrived at Harvard Yard with any counter-culture predilections, they were based on the Beats and the Beach Boys, on Jack Kerouac in particular, and on the hedonistic rebelliousness of California. Kerouac isn't mentioned in "The Harvard Psychedelic Club." Neither are the Beach Boys or, for that matter, any of rock `n roll. By Lattin's account, everything began with The Jefferson Airplane. The California cohort at Harvard in the years 1960-1964 came with more experience of mescaline and peyote than Tim Leary at the time. Many of us had already discarded drug-fueld mysticism for the more earnest struggle to `fix' our society. Harvard in the early `60s was afire with social protest, with demonstrations against HUAC and lingering McCarthyism, with freedom-riding and lunch-counter sit-ins, with resistance to the colonialist boycott of Cuba and the limitation of passport freeodms, above all with opposition to the shameful Cold War involvement in Vietnam and the Draft. I was part of all those movements during my Harvard years, and I still consider them the defining experiences of my class ('64). Leary and Alpert? We all knew about them, and considered them a minor diversion. Andy Weil? One of those self-important Crimson editors. Weil's reportage in the Crimson did indeed contribute to the expulsion of Leary and Alpert from their faculty positions in 1963, but believe me, that was on the docket anyway. Weil's lifelong guilt about his role in the downfall of the (non-existant) Harvard Psychedelic Club is a bit ludicrous; as usual, Weil exaggerates his own importance.

I mention all this in reference to the principal shortcoming of Dan Lattin's literary effort: its partiality to a "post hoc ergo propter hoc" assessment of the milieu, and its dishonesty by omissions. Notice please the subtitle of Lattin's book: "How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America." Sorry, Dan. That's not the whole story after all.

I want to add my praise to the other rave reviews of this important book. The Harvard Psychedelic Club is pure delight! The years have flown by in the twinkling of an eye but I too have never forgotten my LSD experiences from the 1960's. While I'm familiar with the writings of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert/Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil, I had no idea how their lives converged and all the cosmic links to other leading figures of our era. Of special interest to me were the connections to Aldous Huxley and Maynard Ferguson, two people with deep roots in the mystical Valley of Ojai, California. The whole saga is absolutely fascinating! Plus, it's great fun to see photographs of the main characters in the various stages of their lives. If you've ever wondered what Dr. Weil looks like without his trademark bushy beard, check out this book!
--Suza Francina