'Timothy Leary: A Biography,' by Robert Greenfield - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times

'Timothy Leary: A Biography,' by Robert Greenfield - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times: "Nearly every page is riveting in 'Timothy Leary,' which unfolds like the great novel Sinclair Lewis might have written had he lived to the age of 120....the book provides a crash course in several aspects of 60's culture: its often gaseous rhetoric, its reliance on mahatmas and soothsayers, its endless bail-fund benefits and sometimes dubious appeals to conscience, its thriving population of informers, its contribution to the well-being of lawyers, its candyland expectations and obstinate denials of reality, its fatal avoidance of critical thinking, its squalid death by its own hand. That still leaves many meritorious elements largely outside Leary's sphere: civil rights, the antiwar movement, music and art, the impulse toward communitarianism, to name a few. In part because of Leary, however, ideals and delusions were encouraged to interbreed, their living progeny being avid consumerism and toothless dissent."

Make sure you read the first chapter, here, where I found two factual things I have in common with this other Tim: "There could not have been a family more unlike the outgoing, gregarious, reckless Learys than the quiet and pious Ferris clan from which Tim's mother, Abigail, came. The shining star of the Ferris family was Abigail's maternal uncle, Father Michael Kavanaugh. Born in 1873, he graduated first in his class at Holy Cross".