I learned a lot reading this book. This book just deals with the time in Timothy Leary's life when he a fugitive. Nixon was determined to hunt him down and use his as a scapegoat. I was not familiar with a lot of the history and how harrowing Leary's exile was. The book was well written and an exciting read. Enjoy

This is not a dry, academic text on political history. This reads like a trashy novel, but with all the characters replaced with famous and infamous radical and counterculture figures of the 60s and 70s. With the bumbling Leary in the center, a truly bizarre story unfolds. The whole time I was reading this book, I kept stopping just to exclaim, "The 70s were CRAZY!" at whomever would listen.

What a wild ride! It makes today seem a little tame; and happy at least there aren’t as many bombings. The focus of the book was more on Leary than Nixon. The book starts with Leary in prison, going forward from there. I like the linear way the book was presented. It was crazy enough that just going forward in time was the best way. I found the book a good insight into the early 70’s, it was a time of change and uprising.

OOn September 12, 1970, the LSD proponent and self-styled philosopher Timothy Leary escaped California Men’s Colony–West, the minimum security prison where he had been serving a ten-year sentence for an overblown drugs charge. The breakout was orchestrated by the Weathermen, a violent revolutionary group seemingly at odds with Leary’s mellow and far more psychedelic brand of “turn on, tune in, drop out” activism. But the Weathermen would not make the strangest of Leary’s bedfellows. Within a matter of weeks, the former Harvard lecturer and his then wife Rosemary would be under the nominal protection of the Black Panthers in Algiers, where Eldridge Cleaver’s militant, patriarchal arm of the organization had set up a kind of embassy-in-exile.

As blissed-out seekers of transcendence, pleasure and attention, it did not take long for the Learys to overstay their welcome: “[W]e have grown to look upon them sort of as patients, sort of as responsibilities that we have to take care of”, Cleaver said in a tactical communiqué to the underground press. Lured by the promise of the lecture circuit, the couple fled to Denmark, only to become stranded in Switzerland en route. There they found themselves wards of the shady arms dealer Michel Hauchard, who offered them sybaritic, albeit precarious sanctuary in exchange for extended rights to Leary’s future literary output. Rosemary would soon walk away to spend the next two decades on the lam while the fifty-one-year-old Leary took up with the twenty-something Swiss-born socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith.

When the fickle forces of international politics caught up with Leary yet again, he (now with purple hair from a botched dye job) and Harcourt-Smith (suffering from acute hepatitis after gulping polluted “holy” water scooped from the Ganges) sought refuge in Afghanistan, where Leary, in the latest of his serially naive delusions, expected red-carpet treatment. “We’ll have all the Afghani hash we want”, he assured Harcourt-Smith, “and the king will visit us and treat you like a royal princess”. Instead, they were almost immediately fingered by an accomplice and placed on an extradition flight to Los Angeles. That marked the end of Leary’s twenty-eight months as a fugitive. He would then conveniently turn FBI informant.

These are, of course, only the major waypoints in a tale with many more twists, dead-ends and pop-culture cameos. And through it all, in the face of massive civil unrest, war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon was in monomaniacal pursuit, branding Leary with the label from which this book takes its title. Paradoxically, that only cemented Leary’s status as a countercultural folk hero. Recounted in no-frills, present-tense prose and chapters that read like snapshot bursts, Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis’s joint narrative is a colourful and illustrative slice from a particularly turbulent time in recent history. Were it not rooted in real-life events, it would sound like a bad trip.

I found this book compulsively readable. I didn't know much about Timothy Leary before reading it, but I'm very interested in the political and cultural climate of the late 60's and early 70's, so some study of the man at the heart of those years was in order. The book covers Leary's escape from prison and recounts in detail his time with self-exiled Black Panthers in Algeria, as well as Leary's many connections with other in/famous players around the world. The background history, and the geography he traversed as he evaded recapture (Switzerland, Austria, Afghanistan) was easily as fascinating as Leary himself.

Reading this book makes you realise that fact is stranger than fiction. A totally paranoid President Nixon decides to use Timothly Leary as a scapegoat in his antidrug platform in the coming presidentual election.
Joining in on this surreal journey is Algeria, the Black Panther movement, Weather Underground group bombing the establishment institutions, Brotherhood of Eternal Love zoning out, Hippies, arms dealers and.serious money men.
A well researched period in a time when the Vietnam war was escalating and large sections of American society was questioning the ethics of a nation.
An independent review for NetGalley

"The Most Dangerous Man in America" is an informative and somewhat interesting nonfiction book that is slightly let down by the writing style. LSD isn't something I've read a lot about so I wasn't even aware of this person or this particular time in history all too much.

This book was fascinating. You almost can’t believe it’s real. Truth is stranger than fiction in this case, for sure.

Following the life of Timothy Leary, the story is just too good. Opening with a prison break and chronicling Tim’s excursions around the world on the run, there is never a dull moment.

Suspenseful, wildly entertaining, unforgettable. This book is worth the read. It started to feel a little too dark toward the end. But it was a wild ride the whole way.

The subtitle should probably be: When Truth is Stranger Than Fiction. This is one of those nonfiction books so wild and crazy that, while reading it, you’d swear it was historical fiction. It’s not.

The story revolves around two men who were in many ways polar opposites. One a straight-laced Commie hunting US President and one a former college professor turned acidhead guru. Both men nevertheless were obsessive and paranoid. Perhaps eighty percent of the book is about Timothy Leary, the acid guru who turned the world on to LSD, and about twenty percent devoted to Nixon’s lustful obsession with capturing Leary. In it, the authors bring to life the turbulent end of the Sixties.

The heart of the story is Leary’s arrest in California and imprisonment for what turned out to be a fairly minor possession compared to the thousands of doses Leary had distributed. Leary, a former genius level Harvard professor, scales the fence of his minimum security prison and flees custody in the hands of the Weathermen, a violent homegrown terrorist group which took its name from a line in a Dylan song (you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows). Thus, the drug priest of the Sixties counterculture linked himself in his own self interest to a group dedicated to the violent overthrow of democracy and capitalism.

From there, it got even worse as Leary and his wife (Rosemary) fled the country to Algeria where the Black Panthers led by Cleaver had formed an anti-American embassy in a country hostile to us. Their links to the violent terrorists of the PLO and the dictator of North Korea took the counterculture and Leary to alliances with absolute evil.

The play by play story of Leary’s year long stay in Algeria and his often difficult relations with the Panthers fill out a lot of the story as does Leary’s constant suspicion of Nixon’s CIA.

It’s a fascinating story, showing the idealism of the Sixties bursting apart in seams of violence and betrayal. Back at home, the country was divided and hostile.

While Leary is clearly the main character here, he is not idolized by the authors. Rather he is shown with all his faults, all his warts.

The writing here is Superb.

This book is a very good review of the radical life of Leary juxtaposed with Nixon's (and the Nixon administration's) paranoia about the young and radical generation. Although Leary was much older than most of the rest of the "hippies" and revolutionaries, his promotion of hallucinogenic drugs and sexual freedom drew the radicals to him, and made him the Nixon administration's "most dangerous man". One of the concerns that I had about the book was it's relative lack of footnotes and credits for much of the information and quotes, which were certainly intimate (and believable". The book is highly entertaining and I recommend it.

Joseph Corsmeier

This is a wild story, and the wildest part is that it all actually happened. What a strange life, and not just Timothy Leary's, but quite a few other people's on his path, whose stories are at least glanced over in this book as well. It could certainly make a good action movie. It's a unique glance at one of the toughest, fullest of change decades in American history - the state scandals, the underground culture, the Vietnam war.

Timothy Leary's escape is certainly unbelievable, but it's even more interesting to read about the fix he gets himself into after that - caught up in a guerilla organization he never wanted to be part of, juggled as an unwanted guest by various countries, almost bought and toyed with by rich people, as if he's a trophy. Life is weird - but especially weird if you're Timothy Leary.

This was certainly an interesting read, and I can't wait to read more books about this complicated decade in history.

I thank the publisher for giving me a free copy of the ebook in exchange to my honest review. This has not affected my opinion.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

2.5 stars rounded down because it would have only been 2 if I hadn’t learned something (low bar, public education, etc etc).

Anything remotely related to the drug war is of huge interest to me. I work for a federal agency in addictions and am plagued by the DEA. I found the topic and basic information fascinating and it made me want to explore more on the Black Panthers and Kathleen Cleaver specifically. But the whole book was so poorly written; it read like an episode of Drunk History. I felt like it was a basic retelling of events, with some foul language to make it seem like more of a novel, when it just gave me the same icky feeling that I get when trapped at a party by a man trying to tell me how cool and open-minded he is. GOOD DAY SIR.

I appreciate being approved for this book but unfortunately I cant read it due to it not being in a Kindle format. I was excited when I saw a book on Timothy Leary. Hopefully I can get a way to read this

I usually only read fiction, but I thought I would give this one a try. I am glad I did. Although at times I thought the author detailed things out too much, this is a book I would recommend to all.

Almost every incident in this book is news to me. I was familiar with Timothy Leary. I knew he promoted LSD and the idea that everyone should 'Turn on, tune in and drop out." I didn't know that he was arrested & imprisoned, then escaped his prison and avoided Nixon's wrath by hiding out in Algiers in Switzerland with the help of revolutionary activists. This book is an eye opening adventure that will make you re-think what you thought you knew about the 60s.

Wow. I had NO IDEA much of this story happened... I was born in 1973 - so I'm a child of the '70s literally, not figuratively. There's a lot I missed, apparently, and despite my reading about Nixon's paranoia in other forms, I had no idea he was quite so insane over Timothy Leary! This was a fascinating look at the insanity of the Vietnam and original counterculture era. The characters are almost too over-the-top to be real, yet I know they all are. Ditto the situations... From prison breaks to Algerian Black Panthers to domestic terrorists, this book is a wild ride.

Frankly, I began to get worn down by it - it's a thoroughly presented and documented tale, but that thoroughness means that it's also a hefty one. That's not necessarily a failing - it just meant that it felt like I was reading it forever, and that I occasionally found myself putting it down in exchange for lighter, less world-is-insane fare... The writing is clear and engaging and the pictures it paints are, at times, all too vivid. It's an album, not a snapshot, of a period in time when the world (or at least our American corners of it) seemed poised on a knife's edge.

Read it and learn what a home grown revolt against repression looks like.