Book Review: “Harvard Psychedelics Club” by Don Lattin

Posted: January 5th, 2010 | Filed under: Book Reviews | Tags: Book review, don lattin, harvard psychedelics club |

“The Harvard Psychedelic Club” is billed as the story of how three brilliant scholars and one ambitious freshman – Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil ushered in a New Age for America.

Author and journalist Don Lattin weaves together fascinating stories and dialogues of these four revolutionaries and the people they encountered.

As someone born in the 1970s, I’d heard about the free love of the ‘60s.

Sounded like a great idea. A crazy one at that. Those crazy hippies!

What is good about this book is how the stories of these four innovators is presented – well researched, and thorough with detail. Without this book packaging together their stories all in one place, I might not have stumbled upon the rich lessons to be learned from such an influential era, including:

- How movements are created
- The power of the press in creating a movement
- The power of attaining a high research position, and platform from which to broadcast new ways of thinking, new ways of expanding the world
- That there is more to life than simply a linear, “driven” motion towards success
- Research methods that brought psychedelics to prisons, and to seminary students
- How it can take years for the masses to catch up to “outrageous” ideas

While this book is jam-packed with facts, this is also the book’s downfall – that it’s jam-packed with facts, stitched together in careful chronological order. “Stitched”, because it is pulled together from a myriad of books, interviews, reports, and other resources. “Careful”, because it feels as if the author, in an attempt to make the book as historically accurate and respectful as possible, is too afraid to say anything that might be “wrong”.

There were many times that, just as I felt I was about to learn something rich and illuminating, the author switched topics. For instance, I wanted more research data and results of the prison psychedelics study, the impact on the prisoners in the long run, how it affected future studies and treatments for hardened criminals. But after a lengthy introduction of the players involved in this series experiments, the section simply ended. What happened afterwards? What came the experiments??

If you’re looking for a lyrical account of what happened during the revolutionary ‘60s, this is not your book. If you’re looking for a well-researched and detailed account with more detail than a Wikipedia entry, this could be a fascinating read.

For more information about the author Don Lattin, visit http://www.DonLattin.com