The Harvard Psychedelic Club How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil killed the fifties and ushered in a new age for America

BITS of the Trickster were shot into orbit for the ultimate trip after his death at 75. The Seeker, 78, lives on Maui, where he has gone to die. The Teacher, now 90, finally published a memoir last year. And the Healer, 67, presides over an alternative-health empire, selling items like Weil by Nature's Path Organic Banana Manna Pure Fruit and Nut Bars. These four men are at the center of "The Harvard Psychedelic Club," Don Lattin's unexpectedly grounded story of "How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered In a New Age for America," as the book's more breathless subtitle has it. In mini-biographies, Lattin charts their separate paths to shared - and legal - academic experiments with psilocybin mushrooms and LSD at Harvard in the early 1960s. He documents their split, when Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) were booted from their teaching posts after Harvard figured out just how far outside the lab the pair's research had taken them. And Lattin follows the four on their trips beyond Cambridge. Anyone expecting "The Electric KoolAid Acid Test" has come to the wrong book but might want to stick around anyway. Lattin lacks the Wolfean verbal razzle-dazzle, but Tom Wolfe was "off the bus " in that he apparently didn't partake, and he needed all his writer's tricks to conjure an extra-reality he hadn't experienced. Lattin mostly skips the Day-Glo word pictures, but then, as he says in the afterword, he has been there, most definitely done that. If he can't paint a scene - and what a scene - the way Wolfe can, he does manage to make sense of a complicated movement so often reduced to its parody-ready costumes, haircuts and groovy lingo. And he does it with authority and an evenhanded understanding of the good, the bad and the crazy of it. Lattin's book can be viewed partly as a prequel to Wolfe's. By the time the Merry Pranksters took their show on the road, the West Coast's anarchic aggression had pretty much rolled over what the relatively disciplined East Coasters had tried to bottle, label and dispense with care. After Harvard, Leary and Alpert had decamped to an estate in Millbrook, N.Y., continuing their efforts to tap into higher consciousness in a controlled setting. When Ken Kesey's Pranksters showed up, as Wolfe tells it, they encountered "one big piece of uptight constipation." Timothy Leary, 1966. The funny thing was, the Learyites hadn't been restrained enough. Back at Harvard, a social psychologist had accused the group of fostering "an anti-intellectual atmosphere," and Leary didn't dispute that he was "sick of these old lab rats, these dour experimentalists." How could their "lame questionnaires" compete with magic mushrooms? It was Weil who dealt the fatal blow. A student of botany, he had eagerly volunteered for the psilocybin research but was rejected because Harvard had instructed Leary and Alpert to stay away from undergraduates. The scorned Weil struck back in The Crimson: "The shoddiness of their work as scientists is the result less of incompetence than of a conscious rejection of scientific ways of looking at things. . . . They are contemptuous of all organized systems of action - of what they call the 'roles' and 'games' of society. . . . Yet . . . they will play these games to further their own ends." Weil comes off at times as something of the villain of the piece, painted first as a hypocritical snitch, later as an evangelist for pharmaceutical possibility who helped the '90s mainstream culture catch up with the '60s counterculture and made a mint doing it. Smith, the group's religious scholar, decided that psychedelics held a false promise; the mystical experience didn't carry over into the nondrugged state. Similarly, Alpert concluded that drugs like LSD allowed you only to "visit" the state of consciousness of a saint. Not for the irrepressible Leary a rejection of the tools for enabling "each person to realize that he is not a game-playing robot put on this planet to be given a Social Security number and to be spun on the assembly line of school, college, career, insurance, funeral, goodbye," as he once told Playboy. But near the end of his life, he acknowledged that not everyone felt as he did about his work. "Seven million people I turned on," he said, "and only 100,000 have come by to thank me." Mary Jo Murphy is an editor at the Week in Review section of The Times.

*Starred Review* This would be a terrific social history of a fascinating historical period even if it didn't star some of the most important influences on today's culture. But Andrew Weil remains a guru of alternative medicine and nutrition, and Huston Smith's books on world religion are required reading at almost every college, while Timothy Leary and Ram Dass are icons of consciousness exploration through drugs and Eastern religions, respectively. So this energetic study of the time all four were together at Harvard tells much about today's culture. Lattin's quasifictional techniques (most notably, reconstructed dialogue) bring to life the antics of trickster Leary, who once said that he'd turned seven million people on and only 100,000 ever thanked him, and seeker Ram Dass (originally Richard Alpert), who helped bring awareness of meditation and other Indian religious techniques to the West. Smith, son of Christian missionaries in China and early on a fellow traveler with Leary and Alpert, determined that drugs constituted but a shortcut to the religious ecstasy he sought, while Weil's opposition was instrumental in ending Leary's and Alpert's tenures at Harvard (although he was himself experimenting with the same drugs). Some laugh-aloud passages make this an entertaining read, but the underlying exploration of the sociocultural reasons for the extravaganza that was the 1960s merits attention, especially from those interested in the period.--Monaghan, Patricia Copyright 2010 Booklist

It's hard for folks who didn't live through the 1960s to imagine what it was like to live in a drug- and sex-soaked culture, one where traditional values were drowned in a rush of hedonism and hippiedom. Names like Timothy Leary and Ram Dass bring back all the memories and all the conflicts. In this beautifully constructed study, Lattin (Jesus Freaks) brings together four of the most memorable figures from that period. Each comes across as a flawed genius and irrepressible fanatic. The author says of Leary that he "activate[d] conservative anxiety in America," but this could easily describe any of the players in this grim and gritty story. Laying out their stories side by side in roughly chronological form, the author traces the lives of each of the players, exposing a kind of dysfunctional relationship among them that is not part of our corporate memory. This is a fast-moving, dispassionate recounting of a seminal period in our history, and all in all, a wonderful book. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Should Bob Dylan or Civil Rights leader John Lewis-to name just two men who moved us on from the Fifties-happen upon this book and its subtitle, they might raise an objection, or several. The subtitle's hype telegraphs the book's weakness-a sensationalist tone-in what is essentially a stimulating collective biography of gurus of tripping, New Age spiritualism, academic ecumenicalism, and alternative medicine. A highly regarded veteran journalist, Lattin (Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge) is strong on vignette and well sourced: he personally interviewed all but Leary in-depth. And his coverage of how these four very different men intersected and to degrees collaborated or fought one another in a brief few years in Cambridge, MA, over the meaning, use, and abuse of psychedelics is a significant advance to Sixties historiography. Reporting from the diverse precincts of American religiosity, Lattin studs his narrative with "recreated dialogue," which, while vetted by his oral sources, often distracts from the authentic contributions of these extraordinary men. Verdict For lifestyle readers interested in how seekers got from then to now.-Scott H. Silverman, Earlham Coll. Lib., Richmond, IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.