Book description
One family's adventures in LSD: the brilliantly strange new novel from the mind of 'one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today' (Lionel Shriver) Chosen as a Book of the Year 2019 by the Herald It is Harvard in the early 1960s. Just off…
Why read it?
1 author picked Outside Looking In as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I find this novel intensely absorbing as it focuses on Timothy Leary's experiments with psychedelics and communal living in the early sixties.
After a prelude depicting the discovery of LSD's properties and power by a Swiss scientist in 1942, the viewpoint switches to a graduate psychology student and his wife as they are drawn into Leary's inner circle through the initial Harvard-approved weekend psilocybin and LSD parties, the summer-long bacchanalian revelries of drugs and sex in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and the communal social experiment in Millbrook, New York.
I can appreciate how Leary is presented as a charismatic, somewhat deluded guru…
From John's list on celebrating the psychedelic sixties.
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