With care and considerable humor, Don Lattin shows us how the interwoven relationships of four charismatic visionaries contributed to the expansion of mind that changed American culture forever. The way we eat, pray, and love have all been conditioned by their lives and teachings. - Mirabai Bush, co-founder and Senior Fellow of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, co-author (with Ram Dass) of Compassion in Action
I suspect I’m not the only person who thought the psychedelics-at-Harvard story had been pretty well settled, but Lattin’s work has widened my perspective considerably. By focusing on Huston Smith and Andrew Weil as well as Leary and Alpert, he’s created a stimulating and thoroughly engrossing read. - Dennis McNally, author of A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, and Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America
A terrific social history of a fascinating historical period . . . laugh-aloud passages make this an entertaining read. - Booklist (starred review)
The Harvard Psychedelic Club is not only a great read, it’s also an unforgettable head trip. Lattin weaves a masterful tale of 1960s-style spirituality, professional jealousy, and out-of-body experiences. Lattin has done his homework and it shows. Read this book and expand your mind. No hallucinogenics required. - Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Bliss
“I’d be lying... if I said I didn’t enjoy just about every page of The Harvard Psychedelic Club. This groovy story unfurls - chronicling the lives of men who were brilliant but damaged, soulful but vengeful, zonked-out but optimistic and wry - like a ready-made treatment for a sprawling, elegiac and crisply comic movie.” - Northside San Francisco
“Lattin’s account is a sometimes funny, sometimes inglorious, and often sad story of how four men… were utterly transformed by psychedelics, and how they tried to use those same drugs to transform American culture. …Unlike most other books on the infamous days of the sanctioned Harvard drug experiments… The Harvard Psychedelic Club takes up the petty jealousies, the closeted sexualities, the urgent spiritual desires, and the parties - the endless, bombed-out, stoned immaculate parties. …The Harvard Psychedelic Club fills an important niche in the already niche genre of sixties and psychedelic histories. - The Revealer
“...a journalistic look at what was really a series of Romantic experiments, an early-Sixties exploration of different possibilities for how people could live in the body. There was the brief idea that, instead of controlling and regimenting embodied life, instead of loathing and turning against sex and death and decay, we might let the self (whatever that is) bleed into the rest of the universe, and let the universe bleed back.” - Bookslut.com
“...[T]hese stories provide the psychedelic movement with context and continued relevance-important elements for a generation of readers trained to laugh at stock hippie characters and stoner epiphanies.” - The Onion
“Don Lattin, one of America’s most-respected religion newswriters in recent years, has been devoting his considerable skills to unearthing and fully reporting some of these milestone stories. This Harvard book is his latest revelation.” - ReadtheSpirit.com
“Don Lattin’s recent Harvard Pychedelic Club is a wryly tumultuous history… [that] focuses sharply on the group that began in Cambridge.” - The Huffington Post
“[An] unexpectedly grounded story...makes sense of a complicated movement so often reduced to its parody-ready costumes, haircuts, and groovy lingo. And [Lattin] does it with authority and an evenhanded understanding of the good, the bad, and the crazy of it.” - The New York Times Book Review
“Lattin satisfyingly places the parallel and interconnected lives of these four titans along a timeline, drawing in a cast of minor characters as fascinating as its stars.” - BookReporter.com
“In ‘The Harvard Psychedelic Club’ Lattin adds depth, breadth and surprises to the story. Searchers, thinkers, philosophers and occasional wackos fill the pages of this entertaining book with their quests and questionable behavior. The book is a fast, often delightful read… This is a good one.” - San Mateo County Times
“[T]horoughly engaging… Packing his book with strange, wonderful scenes, Lattin argues that America would never be the same because of an unlikely quartet that did time — and drugs — at Harvard in the early 1960s.” - New York Post
“[A] colorful tale.” - Boston Globe
“Lattin... brings us a rigorously honest exploration of interconnected relationships…the book successfully highlights the synchronistic arrival of four now-legendary figures at Harvard and how their interrelations provided some of the initial conditions for the large-scale chaos that the ‘60s became. ...Lattin tells it the way it should be told.” - Santa Cruz Weekly
“Lattin’s new book The Harvard Psychedelic Club takes a lucid look at four founding fathers of a movement that changed America and thus the world.” - PsychologyToday.com
“Lattin artfully weaves [the stories] together,creating a stronger, more compelling narrative that enlightens as much as it informs. ...Mind-blowing.” - Religion News Service
“The Harvard Psychedelic Club sets the record straight: Four extraordinary personalities crossed paths, and the result was electrifying.” - Portland Oregonian
“[The] book examines the lives and times of four men — Timothy Leary; Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass; Andrew Weil; and Huston Smith — whose paths crossed in the 1960s at Harvard, and who launched the mind-body-spirit movement. Lattin brings together four of the most memorable figures from that period.” - Poughkeepsie Journal
“Lattin weaves the biographies of these brilliant men into a compelling tale of possibilities and disappointments, angels and demons, triumph and tragedy… a page-turner that can stand proudly alongside its fictional counterparts.” - Northern Dutchess News
“Don Lattin tells the story with panache…[he is] fascinated by these men, but he’s also a fierce judge of their trespasses and their lapses from authenticity. (So we’re glad to have him tell the story.)” - The Los Angeles Times
“Informative and entertaining” - HistoryWire.Com
“Lattin… deftly captures the intoxicated spirit of the 1960s zeitgeist… [The Harvard Psychedelic Club is] a fresh, expertly written text that serves to remind Leary’s generation of their past while providing a new generation with some context of where today’s pervasive drug culture came from.” - The Daily Californian
“The Harvard Psychedelic Club, takes a lucid look at four founding fathers of a movement that changed the world.” - East Bay Express
“An Ivy League campus seems an unlikely place for the word ‘psychedelic’ and all that it implies to first take root, but as journalist Don Lattin writes in his new book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club, the hallowed quads of Cambridge, Mass. are where the New Age movement began. ” - TIME Magazine.com
“The book offers an opportunity to be a fly on the wall, witnessing the unfolding of the decisions, yearnings and -- yes -- drug trips this infamous group experienced centered on seeking a more conscious and freethinking way of life. The Harvard Psychedelic Club’s intimate, revealing vista makes the book soar, and, as Lattin hopes, just might inspire today’s idealists to carve a new path and profoundly change the world as these four dynamic visionaries once did.” - Miami Herald
“The Harvard Psychedelic Club’s intimate, revealing vista makes the book soar, and, as Lattin hopes, just might inspire today’s idealists to carve a new path and profoundly change the world as these four dynamic visionaries once did.” - Miami Herald
“Lattin’s snappy conversational prose and poignant insights into his subjects’ often-tortured personal lives make his book worth the trip.” - Washington City Paper
“...raucous, witty and licentious... [Lattin] has created a post-Kerouac road scholar classic.” - The Edge
“With equal parts keen historicity and great humor, Lattin… chronicles how these founding fathers of the so-called New Age movement in the U.S. and worldwide met at Harvard in the early 60s and - despite rivalries, infighting and backstabbing - managed to change the spiritual landscape for generations to come.” - Chicago Sun-Times
Many of the stories in this book have been told elsewhere, but Lattin tells them with new energy and weaves them together to create a satisfying narrative that re-creates and explains the era. - San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“Lattin succeeds where less accomplished chroniclers of this period have failed.” - San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times
“A rousing tale of jealousy, drugs, betrayal, vengeance, careerism and academic intrigue with a Harvard accent-it also carries the moral that brains alone won’t make you holy.” - Shelf Awareness
“Outstanding book.” - Cleveland Plain-Dealer
“A fast, funny, and savvy book that dishes about some of the most celebrated figures in the American counterculture. What makes “The Harvard Psychedelic Club” so delicious… is Lattin’s insistence on telling the real story of the psychedelic revolution, which included not only the proverbial excesses of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, but also a good measure of old-fashioned “backstabbing, jealousy, and outright betrayal.” - Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
“A fast, funny, and savvy book that dishes about some of the most celebrated figures in the American counterculture.” - Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
A revealing account of four iconic personalities who helped define an era, sowed seeds of consciousness, and left indelible marks in the lives of spiritual explorers to this day. The Conclusion is alone worth the price of the book. - Dan Millman, author of The Peaceful Warrior
This book is a real trip, as we used to say, and it will probably give you flashbacks whether you were there or not. Lattin does a grand job of telling us the wildly improbable story of psychedelic drugs in America, and the jump start of the “new age” spiritual movement. A very far-out read! - Wes `Scoop' Nisker is an author, Buddhist meditation teacher, and performer
Will we ever really understand that state of mind and decade we call “the sixties”? It left pernanent marks on our society including changes in psychology, politics, the food we eat, how we think about mental and physical health, and much more. Lattin has crafted a riveting account of four of the personalities who deeply influenced those cultural shifts...for good or for ill. A skillfully woven group biography it is thoroughly researched, wonderfully readable and sparkles with keen insights. Tim Leary, Richard Alpert (Ram Das), Andrew Weil and Huston Smith all come alive, both as fascinating personalities and in their inrtricate relationships with each other.This is not just a book about magic mushrooms or LSD. It is the story of a turning point we are still living with. - Harvey Cox, Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, author of The Future of Faith
In this beautifully constructed study, Lattin brings together four of the most memorable figures from that period…this is a fast-moving, dispassionate recounting of a seminal period in our history, and all in all, a wonderful book. - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy just about every page . . . This groovy story unfurls — chronicling the lives of men who were brilliant but damaged, soulful but vengeful, zonked-out but optimistic and wry — like a ready-made treatment for a sprawling comic movie. - New York Times
Many of the stories in this book have been told elsewhere, but Lattin tells them with new energy and weaves them together to create a satisfying narrative that re-creates and explains the era. . . . By the end of the book, you realize that these four Harvard men did, in fact, “kill the Fifties and usher in a new age for America.” - San Francisco Chronicle Book Review