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...

An Experiment With Time (1927, revised edition 1935) J W Dunne   13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time (2009) Michael Brooks   An Experiment With Time is a scientific and philosophical (and the author would like to think psychological) treatise on time in the context of the author's and others' experience of precognition in dreams. It is anomalous but it is also a serious if difficult book which has achieved cult status because it represented a sincere scientific attempt to deal with the problem of precognition at that point in history when spiritualism was already a memory amongst serious thinkers and the new physics had not yet fully established itself in the public's consciousness. However, it is a very difficult book indeed. The writer is at pains to be clear and he does a good job of this but you have to be of a mathematical or analytical bent to get anything out of this book and I am afraid that I am not.  ...