Timothy Leary: A Biography [Paperback]

Robert Greenfield (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 2007

To a generation in full revolt against any form of authority, "Tune in, turn on, drop out" became a mantra, and its popularizer, Dr. Timothy Leary, a guru. A charismatic and brilliant psychologist, Leary became first intrigued and then obsessed by the effects of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s while teaching at Harvard, where he not only encouraged but instituted their experimental use among students and faculty. What began as research into human consciousness turned into a mission to alter consciousness itself. Leary transformed himself from serious social scientist into counterculture shaman, embodying the idealism and the hedonism of an age of revolutionary change.

Timothy Leary is the first major biography of one of the most controversial figures in postwar America.

(20060415)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Greenfield, award-winning biographer of Jerry Garcia and Bill Graham, paints another '60s portrait in this scathing account of counterculture hero and LSD guru Timothy Leary (1920–1996). Largely based on interviews with Leary's friends and acquaintances, this book offers a highly detailed and decidedly ugly portrayal of a pathologically selfish, narcissistic yet complex man who lacked basic qualities such as empathy and compassion. Worse, Leary, the cynosure of the psychedelic movement, who preached the power of LSD and other drugs to expand human consciousness and foster change, fails to exhibit the capacity for inner growth. Greenfield's gaze alights as much on the quotidian (who cooked what for dinner when) as on the sensational (drugs, sex, Black Panthers, parades of famous figures like Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman). Despite the visceral dislike for Leary that readers are likely to develop, many will be intrigued by the unlikely course of his life, which took him from a prestigious position as a Harvard lecturer to the California penal system, and later to work as a government informer in an Algerian compound with Eldridge Cleaver . Leary ends up a dissipated, broken man, who remains self-promoting enough to suggest, in 1996, that he would kill himself while logged on to yet another new phenomenon, the Internet. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* After launching his pioneering and brazen inquiry into the effects of psychedelic drugs at Harvard, Leary (1920-96) became the reigning psychedelic guru, declaring, "You must turn on, tune in, and drop out." In the first comprehensive biography of this notorious and puzzling figure, Greenfield trenchantly analyzes Leary's pseudospirituality, egoism, thrill seeking, strange brew of naivete and wiliness, and mind-boggling ability to ingest astronomical amounts of LSD, all the while meticulously and incredulously chronicling Leary's epic misadventures, including masterminding communal chaos at an estate in Millbrook, New York; a daring prison break; and exile in Algiers under the baleful eye of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Charismatic and cunning, lacking in compassion and common sense, Leary--the emperor of acid, the jet-setting court jester of the counterculture, and an Elmer Gantry-like evangelist in the church of self-indulgence--lived at least nine lives. Greenfield masterfully shapes an unwieldy amount of astounding, often troubling material so that both the absurdity and tragedy of Leary's life come clear. A veritable who's who of the age of Aquarius and a real page-turner, Greenfield's cornerstone portrait of the acidhead who would be king brilliantly illuminates the paradoxes of the psychedelic age. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 704 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (August 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156032066
• ISBN-13: 978-0156032063
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,313,234 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Robert Greenfield: the new Albert Goldman?, June 4, 2006

By 

Bill "Bill FOR TL" (Keizer Or) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Timothy Leary: A Biography (Hardcover)

Robert Greenfield has created an Epic Novel [masquerading as non-fiction] in his newly-released biography "Timothy Leary" [2006, Harcourt, $28.00].
I will state up front that I am long an admirer of Dr Timothy Leary who, along with The Beatles and Bob Dylan, was one of the most famous/infamous figures of the turbulent 1960's with his call to "change your mind" "Question Authority" and "Turn On Tune In Drop Out."
That said, I purchased a copy of Greenfield's book out of curiosity and with an awareness that the author's tone was less than sympathectic to his subject [advance praise for the book made that clear back in May 06].
Now, 689 pages later, I am compelled to write this review as a caution to others who may not fully know the Leary story from LEARY'S point of view.
Mr Greenfield makes a point of describing Timothy Leary [over and over] as self-centered, self-serving, a liar, a bad parent...there is nothing in Leary's 75 years of life that Mr Greenfield describes without derisive asides and "notes."
Worse, there is a FICTIONIALIZED DRAMATIC NARRATIVE that has been used to serve as a book-end to this dreary bio [Leary, in bed as a child, awaiting his father's arrival home for the inevitalbe beating his father would administer to Leary, in bed as a dying man, awaiting his 'punishment' from...?]

Most hard to take is the inference that Leary's masterpiece "Flashbacks" [1983 autobiography] was loaded with inaccuracies and lies. One such "lie" refers to Leary claiming to have slept with actress Marilyn Monroe.
I have copies of every edition of "Flashbacks" and none makes such a claim.
Also galling is the assertion that actor Cary Grant was "more candid than Leary ever was" in accounts of his [Grant's] LSD experiences back in 1958. What was Leary doing from 1963 [dismissal from Harvard] to 1970 [imprisonment]if not advocating the benefits of further drug research? The call for government to responsibly research and license psychedelic drugs was Leary's mantra for those 7 or so heady years.

This book is ambitious but falls short of hitting the mark, assuming said mark was to cover the story of leary's life thoroughly, accurately.
Greenfield has filled these 689 pages with much of what Leary had already written in numerous volumes during his lifetime-and, ultimately, this book calls to mind another biographer, Albert Goldman, who also took a jaundiced view point of his deceased] subjects.
To sum up: Save your money and buy a copy of "Flashbacks."

Bill Picha
Salem Oregon

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Judgmental and Short-Sighted ... But Good, June 13, 2006

By 

Michael Garcia (Eagle Rock, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Timothy Leary: A Biography (Hardcover)

This book was hard to put down.

I have always admired Timothy Leary and after reading this biography, I admire the man even more.

Okay ... he was selfish. He was a liar. He was a lot of things that many or all of us are. He was human.

Greenfield ends his volume by stating that "the man who advocated change but could never change himself" had died.

I take issue with his conclusion. Whether Leary "changed" or "grew" is something only Leary knew for sure. Even all of Leary's friends and "friends" couldn't judge that, even if they did get to share Leary's life with him.

Leary was an important man in modern history. He had the courage to point to very important things for people to know. Of course, more superficial people get hung up on the guy doing the pointing instead of what the guy is pointing to.

I never considered Leary to be anything other than a wounded, weak human, so I wasn't disappointed by what I read in this book.

If anything, it made me feel as though he really was a friend of mine, struggling with many of the same challenges that make life the riddle it often can be.

Unlike Greenfield and those who were interviewed for this book, I'm compelled not to make any value judgments on the man who was Timothy Leary.

I prefer to simply love him and be thankful that he helped point me toward reprogramming my own brain and questioning authority.

40 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Trip is Longer & Stranger than the Author Realized, June 9, 2006

By 

Kenneth B. Goffman "R.U. Sirius" (Mill Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Timothy Leary: A Biography (Hardcover)

Four hundred and seventy pages into Robert Greenfield's flawed but poignant biography, Timothy Leary's frivolous and confused Austrian girlfriend, Joanna, gives Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti a ride to see Leary in Folsom prison. After being made to wait an unusually long time, Leary is led into a special visitors cage. Greenfield quotes Joanna, "... Tim came into the cage and his head was shaved and he had blood all over his skull. Very very frightening. He said they had yanked him out of his cell in the early morning and insisted on shaving his head. They shaved it in an extremely clumsy way and he got cut. It was only later that I realized they did it on purpose. They wanted him to look awful in front of his visitors. To show their supremacy over Tim to Ginsberg." So what happens amongst our conspirators when they see Dr. Leary in this condition? They start squabbling with each other, Leary included!

This could be the point where Robert Greenfield might have taken this already multi-dimensional hopscotch distress story and elevated it into a tale for the ages: -- psychedelic Kafka, with enough vintage seventies Orwellian psychodrama to stock several upcoming Pink Floyd albums and X Files spin offs spanning some 35 years of ever-intensifying, government-induced paranoia.

Hey, it's not the story Timothy Leary wanted to tell us, at least not directly, but if the goal is to suck this story dry and reveal it as pitiable for all to see, it seems an enormous failing on Greenfield's part not to take this as a point of departure.

And what sort of departure might this all be leading up to? Escape by starship, apparently, and here again Robert Greenfield misses the absurd complex Science Fictional dimensions of the story. Cue "The Man Who Fell To Earth." Because the fact is that a lot of that stuff that Leary started yakking about after refusing a lifetime sentence in the "Witness Protection" program checks out. Just look at that buzzing wired global neuro-electric circuit that will be used to sell most of the copies of Robert Greenfield's book. Who could have predicted that? Bernadine Dohrn?

Or looking a little more "far out!"... and you may take any view you like in current debates around transhumanism, singularities, evolutionary psychology, and possibilities for actual mutation and evolution in our species; I change my mind all the time about it myself. But the arc of Greenfield's story would have benefited immensely if he'd known anything at all about any of this; if he'd had a clue about Leary's project, which - as fate would have it - finally came into sharp focus during the very same time that his political dignity was being robbed (but not robbed blind).

OK. Now that I've (sort of) defended my guy in the big primate passion wars, I've got to say... Robert Greenfield is still one hell of a good writer: this is sill perhaps the most poignant and resonant adventure tragicomic tale of the 20th Century, particularly if you were planning to enjoy a particularly pungent and decadent aperitif after your apocalypse. What is most pathetic of all is the fact that the American book buying public is probably more interested in another dusty tome on the American Civil War or the scandalous behaviors of Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie (And don't get me wrong. Timmy would have found them both adorable. Why not?)