Customer Reviews

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (Leary, Timothy)

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Timothy Leary was a unique American to say the least. As a longtime fan of Sixties psychedelic rock and Beat literature, It stood to reason that I would find my way to Timothy Leary. This book is an amusing collection of lectures and tales from the High Priest of LSD. I found Leary to be a very humorous writer but he does take liberties with the facts. He misquotes the the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, for example. This book has to be read with a grain of salt. I think Leary intended it this way. It would be terribly insulting to ones intelligence if he didnt. His intelligence and humor do shine through however. I would state that this book should probably be only read for entertainment by those of us who have a bias towards certain experiences that Leary espouses in his book. A real good read but definitely not for everyone.

Solid book by Leary would recommend as well as his other titles. This is one of those books I know I will end up reading multiple times in the years to come.
I really enjoyed this title more than some others of his. Not sure why just the information and stories were cool and kept my attention quite well.

"Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" goes to show that tuning in after dropping out wasn't really an option for Mr. Leary. In spite of the cultural change he helped initiate, he didn't accomplish much after leaving Harvard to begin "concentrating" on the study of his own consciousness.

Leary's work is not only childish and absurd, but lacking a great deal of substance from virtually every perspective. If it weren't for the true intellectual achievements of Albert Hoffman and Aldous Huxley, which show compelling arguments for the research of not only the drugs themselves but the effects on man and society, this era would look like nothing more than a bad trip to anyone looking back.

TL;DR: This book is worth the read for an "understanding" of Leary's mentality, but its ideas should definitely be taken with a grain of salt. (i.e. Don't quit your day job!)

You could say Leary was nothing but a clown, but that would be inaccurate. He was a government operative working with the CIA. Don't take my word for it you can find plenty of info yourselves. There is a reason the personality test for new CIA hires is called the Leary test. Hopefully this rat swine is rotting in hell somewhere.

Very shallow, superficial, immature. I totally understand why he was fired from Harvard