Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties

This beautiful, highly aesthetic book is a true gem for anyone interested in experimental and explorative self-research.Here we get what one might call the 'whole story' of the early years of psychedelic research the way it happened around Timothy Leary at Harvard. First legal though controversial, later absolutely illegal and underground. In the very readable interviewform, some really freeflowing and in-depth conversations between Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), Ralph Metzner and the very wellinformed and empathetic Gary Bravo.The story can of course be read in many ways. A bunch of promissing academics being led astray by seductive drugs. And obviously there was major pitfalls, trips that turned 'bad' because of lack of psychological, philosophical and therapeutic tools to handle them. As Metzner states they could really have used a comprehensive model of the psyche like Stanislav Grof's.But it is also a story about courageous people willing to abandon the narrow materialistic paradigm of Western science to bravely charge for new territory.Central is of course the enigmatic figure of Leary. Martyre or self-deluded messianic? Where Metzner clearly seems the most positive of the two.The book has a wealth of interesting photos from this adventurous times, a tongue-in-cheeck foreword by the illustrious Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow and interesting supplementing comments from the likes of Peggy Hitchcock, George Litwin and Günther Weil.Absolutely essential supplement to  Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics (Suny Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology)