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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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