BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties (2009) Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner Interviewed and Edited By Gary Bravo  The ghost at the centre of this invaluable testimony about the early days of consciousness studies surrounding drugs that alter mental states is, of course, the late Dr. Timothy Leary. This is the well edited transcript of a conversation, mediated by Gary Bravo, between Leary's two main associates in the experimentation that took place, first at Harvard, then at various experimental locations and finally at the Millbrook Commune, between 1960 and 1966 - Richard Alpert (here in his later ego as Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner. Both Dass and Metzner moved on from psychedelic studies to Eastern Tradition spiritual and West Coast consciousness studies respectively, while Leary became part of something that might be called part cultural phenomenon and part resistance movement against authority that h...

Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (1993) Amy Knight   Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky (2009) Bernard M. Patenaude Amy Knight's biography of Beria, who Stalin referred to as his Himmler, was written at a transitional point in the historiography of the Soviet imperium, between the Cold War history created out of guesswork and propaganda and the post-perestroika opening up of Russian archives. It is an excellent book in that context. Beria the man is not very interesting. He is the type of the intelligent corporate psychopath who helps keep complex and otherwise chaotic systems in place but Beria as part of the construction of a unique form of totalitarian governance is much more fascinating. The weakness of the book is that Knight still had to rely on a number of very unreliable 'testimonies' (whether Khrushchev's, Svetlana Alliluyeva's, Sergo Beria's and many others) for lack of data at key periods and that she still cann...