In 1960, Allen Ginsberg, high on William Blake and the resounding success of his epic poem, Howl, met Timothy Leary, the new Harvard psychologist eager to convince the world that getting high on psychedelic drugs could soothe the savage beast in the human heart. Conners (Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead) splendidly brings these two mavericks back to life as he chronicles that first meeting at Leary's house and traces their growing bond as they built the bridges between the "holy trinity" (Albert Hofmann, the father of psychedelics; Aldous Huxley; and William Blake) of visionary consciousness expansion and the 1960s psychedelic movement. Along the way, we glimpse all the familiar faces of the 1960s psychedelic era--Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who conducted their own acid tests; Jack Kerouac; William Burroughs; and Neal Cassady, among others. As Conners keenly observes, Ginsberg gave Leary entrée to the influential world of artistic America, and Leary gave Ginsberg an opportunity to expose America to powerful hallucinatory visions. Conners records Ginsberg and Leary's long, strange trip, from their earliest experiments with psilocybin to their deaths in the late 1990s. (Nov.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. Review"A full account of the two 1960s icons who made it their cause to launch the psychedelic age. . . . an entertaining overview of an era whose echoes still ring." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Through the years City Lights has brought us seminal work by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and now, this detail-rich double bio of Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. I knew both these men pretty well, and the times intimately, and Peter Conners has been true to it all. I don't know how he amassed the trunks of data he must have used to find the jillions of details which were new to me, but I'm certainly glad that he did. This book wins a well deserved spot on my shelf, and belongs with anyone who wants an intimate view of the Sixties-Seventies spinning of the Great Wheel of the Dharma." --Peter Coyote, actor/author, Sleeping Where I Fall

"Peter Conners has given us a wondrous tale of picaresque adventure and authentic friendship--between Leary the trickster-explorer-scientist and Ginsberg the activist-bard-philosopher, two seminal figures who pioneered new pathways through the cultural maelstrom of the sixties." --Ralph Metzner, co-author, with Ram Dass & Gary Bravo, of Birth of a Psychedelic Culture

"The Psychedelic Revolution of the Sixties began with the meeting of two visionary explorers into the unmapped regions of inner consciousness--Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. In the White Hand Society Peter Conners charts the course from the earliest dirt roads of laughing gas to the superhighways of LSD in one compelling story. It is a thrilling ride on what Ginsberg called the Trackless Transit System, going where no one else had dared venture. Take this as a new kind of guidebook into the mystery of the mind." --Bill Morgan, author of The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation

"Peter Conners' White Hand Society is a gripping account of a key event in 20th Century history, the decision to actively promote strong psychedelics to the population at large. Conners tells the Timothy Leary story from the traditional perspective of the West Coast counterculture, but he emphasizes the egalitarian influence that the Beat movement had on him and, in particular, the huge Blakean personality of Allen Ginsberg. The result is a portrait of two remarkable figures who came together and changed our culture forever." --John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary

"In White Hand Society, [Conners is] an historian and a group biographer. The individuals in the group that he profiles include not only Ginsberg, Leary, and the Weather Underground fugitives, but also many of the figures of the drug and countercultures of the 1960s, such as Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Ram Dass, Andrew Weil, and more. Jack Kerouac makes a brief and vivid appearance; his comments about his experiments with psychedelic drugs are well worth reading and pondering." --Jonah Raskin, The Rag Blog

"Conners (Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead) splendidly brings these two mavericks [Ginsberg and Leary] back to life as he chronicles that first meeting at Leary's house and traces their growing bond as they built the bridges between the 'holy trinity' (Albert Hofmann, the father of psychedelics; Aldous Huxley; and William Blake) of visionary consciousness expansion and the 1960s psychedelic movement." --Publishers Weekly