Customer Reviews

Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In: Appreciations, Castigations, and Reminiscences by Ram Dass, Andrew Weil, Allen Ginsberg, Winona Ryder, William ... Huston Smith, Hunter S. Thompson, and Others

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Timothy Leary is a mythological figure. Almost everyone has an opinion of him, even if they have never read a word he wrote.
Often opinions are second-hand filtered through this or that media source.

The editor for this book, Robert Forte, one
of Mircea Eliade's last students at the University of Chicago,
does not provide us with second-hand information that he has digested, but instead, gathers an anthology of viewpoints from those who knew Timothy Leary. Not all are positive, and I was surprized to read the negative remarks of Owlsley Stanley in regards to Leary. Thanks to this compendium, we are allowed past the veil of the myth and get a glimpse of the human Timothy Leary.

Robert Forte knew Timothy Leary personally and has edited another book, Entheogens and the Future of religion, that I highly recommend.

Thomas Seay

Robert Forte is one of the most important living documentarians of psychedelic history and phenomonology. In this book, he's gathered a myriad voices of people who were really "there" when Leary was influencing people and who therefore have valuable commentary worth hearing -- both positive and negative. The folksy, chatty style of this book make it a pleasure to read. Along with his other book "Entheogens and the Future of Religion," Forte is performing an important informational and documentary service toward a fair assessment of the role that drugs have in society and also of the real-life figures who have affected this. This book is a must read for anyone interested in what Tim Leary (and for that matter, ...) were really like.

For anyone having an interest in Leary, friend or foe, fan or scholar, it's all here from the best first-person sources. "You get the Leary you deserve", he said about himself, and an array of Leary's are presented, as remembered by a marvelous and distinguished group. Bravo to editor Robert Forte.

Regardless of one's personal opinions about Timothy Leary, one cannot really deny the fact that he was a great man; great in the sense that his thoughts and ideas influenced an entire generation (and continues to do so), and that A LOT of people had - and still have - A LOT of strong feelings about everything he stood for. Perhaps it's too early to figure out how extensive his influence actually was. Everything he talked about didn't revolve around LSD, even though many tend to think just that. What many don't know, for instance, is that he contributed greatly to the field of psychology and developed different tests that are still in use today.

Robert Forte has edited a book, not about Leary's life, but more about people who met him, were familiar with him, were close to him, were affected and influenced by him, and all in all had some sort of relation to him. Some of these people are Winona Ryder (to whom Leary was godfather), Hunter S. Thompson, Albert Hofmann (the chemist who synthesized LSD in 1938), Ken Kesey (another "psychedelic pioneer"), Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, and many more.

Some of the contributions consist of Forte simply interviewing the individual in question, while in other cases the contributor has written the piece him/herself. But it's not all about Leary all the time. Timothy Leary is more a book about the psychedelic revolution itself than about one of its leading advocates. Richard Nixon referred to him as "the most dangerous man in the world", and sure, a great deal of the content is about him, what he accomplished, different incidents in his life, and so on. However, another great deal is about the use and abuse of psychedelic drugs, how they shaped and changed society and individual consciousness, how dangers (or harmless) they actually are, what happens to people who choose to try them, and how these now criminalized drugs could be used beneficially in different sorts of therapies.

It's not the best book on the market if you want to learn more about Timothy Leary's opinions and messages, but on the other hand, it's a great book if you want to know some of the influence and the affect he had on his surroundings. Furthermore, through its use of sensible discussions by and with well-informed and rational people, the book offers great knowledge about the absurd American "War on Drugs" and all the hypocrisy this futile and senseless war is built upon.

This is a rich and revealing book that I always recommend to anyone trying to grasp the contradictory figure that was Timothy Leary - not least because many of its subjects are still struggling to grasp exactly what hit them when Leary entered their lives. Highlights for me include the essays by Ram Dass, Robert Anton Wilson and Ralph Metzner, as well as William Burroughs' ability to use a few brief words so well. Winona Ryder's eulogy is also terrific -- it has since been included in Copeland's book on the greatest eulogies of our time, and I liked it so much I used it as the foreword to my own biography on Leary, 'I Have America Surrounded'.

As Forte writes in his introduction, this is "not a biography of Leary, nor an in-depth study of his ideas", and as such the critical review on this page by R. Goldstein seems to have missed the point of the book. Forte is not attempting to be a 'cheerleader' or promote his 'thesis', as is claimed, but instead provides a forum where those who knew Leary could record their memories and reminiscences. True, the majority are positive and loving, but this is no reason to criticize the book. The fact is Leary was deeply loved by many - which is something that those who condemn his character find it convenient to overlook. For this reason the book is an important record, but perhaps more importantly it is those who knew him best who often have the most revealing insights - and this is why the book is so valuable.

If you ever wanted to get a realistic personal perspective of an individual who influenced the world as we know it, read this book. Thank you Robert Forte.

This book is a source of comfort to anyone disgruntled by Robert Greenfield's less than appreciative bio of Timothy Leary. Editor Robert Forte calls his project a "festschrift," which, if my rusty German holds up, loosely means "celebration of writing." It is by no means balanced; its cover promises castigations but delivers only one, ironically from former outlaw chemist Owsley Stanley. There are polite rebukes of Leary's methods from Huston Smith and Myron Stolaroff, but the rest of the book is mainly a chorus of paeans, a love fest that gets sloppy in places.

Part of Forte's thesis is that Leary will come to be vindicated and revered as another Socrates or Galileo. Inevitably the uptight world will recognize the transformational power of psychedelics and, grasping the keys to the missing link in evolution, start popping them like vitamin supplements. Why millions of grateful acid veterans haven't united to demand a change in the drug laws goes unexplained. Like a lot of other issues the book grazes. Why was Eldridge Cleaver not more supportive of Leary in Algeria? Why was Art Linkletter hostile to Leary? What happened to Leary's children? What was "The Brotherhood" that Forte cryptically refers to a couple of times? What about the charges that Leary betrayed friends, including the lawyers who helped him avoid lengthier prison time? Although Forte concedes that Leary failed "to confront his shadow," the negative aspects of his life, he left the shadowy particulars for Robert Greenfield to detail.

There are other shortcomings. The correspondence between Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard is vacuous, discussing where and when they plan to meet next. Albert Hofman's contribution is brief. Hunter Thompson's more caustic criticisms of Leary are absent, replaced by a short, all-is-forgiven comment. Some of the respondents use a pretentious argot prevalent in the `60s, reflecting the mindless blather of the drug-addled. And there are outrageous claims that transcendentalist philosophers Emerson and Thoreau took drugs, that psychedelics brought forth the computer revolution and the Internet. At least Forte didn't suggest that psychedelics are "the only visible hope for a race tottering on the brink of extinction." That claim was in a recent letter of complaint from the Leary estate to The New Yorker over the favorable review its critic gave to the Greenfield book.

I don't blame Forte for being a cheerleader. He was only 11 years old during the '67 Summer of Love, so he didn't see the zombies walking down Haight Street and other hippie enclaves ingesting not only psychedelics but other wares sold by hierarchical criminal outfits (such as the Brotherhood?) engaged in the "democratization" of drug distribution. Gosh and golly, why would law enforcement ever consider LSD a gateway to heroin, methamphetamine and crack? Set and setting indeed.

I thought I'd had enough of Leary after reading the Greenfield book, but I picked this one up after browsing its table of contents. It has limited appeal, so I give it three stars: one for the interview with Huston Smith, one for the interviews with Metzner & Stolaroff, and one for likening Leary to Huck Finn. Greenfield mistakenly linked him to Tom Sawyer.