Timothy Leary - Flashbacks byBuoy

Timothy Leary - Flashbacks

This audiobook is quite rare. It is abridged and very good. In 1958 he had just authored a book selected as the best in his field by his peers, but he noted that his profession was bunk. With help 1/3 got better, 1/3 got worse, and 1/3 stayed the same. Without help 1/3 got better, 1/3 got worse, and 1/3 stayed the same. His explorations started from this crisis point.

From planning the psychedelic revolution with Allen Ginsberg, Peggy Hitchcock, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to discussing Dr. Albert Hoffman's legendary bicycle ride home after the world's first deliberate ingestion of LSD, Timothy Leary's passion affected an entire culture and influenced modern world history.

Independent outspoken thinkers are usually persecuted, as was the case with Dr. Timothy Leary. This is a fun book, written by him, so obvious downers such as the suicide of his first wife and the likely reasons behind it (open marriage) are completely avoided.


ISBN 0874778700


With a foreword by William Burroughs, this frenetic autobiography relates the life story of Timothy Leary, one of the key figures of the1960s North American counterculture, and the primary proponent of psychedelia as a way of life. Leary’s controversial views made him a public enemy in the United States, where he was eventually arrested in 1970 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. His escape from prison, and subsequent flight, with the help of the Weathermen, first to Algeria, then to Switzerland, Vienna, Beirut, and finally Kabul, Afghanistan, read like something out of a novel. Other events in Leary’s life were no less dramatic, and he chronicles them in this book openly and energetically. Intriguing cameos of iconic figures are woven into the author’s life history, including one by Cary Grant, whose experiments with lysergic acid are described in detail. Ultimately, Timothy Leary’s memories are as much a record of a singular era in American history as they are one man’s recollections of a struggle against persecution and being ostracized.


This work is my favorite autobiography. Leary really starts at the very beginning (exceptionally humorously) with his conception in his mother's womb and takes you through his early years as a student, his time at Harvard as an esteemed academic and then up through his "retirement" years as a stand up comedian/raconteur and lecturer.
Each chapter is nicely designed with a mini bio of someone who had impressed Leary and then continues with Leary's take on the various events in his life. There is much self-disclosure here in the form of admitting mistakes, something you certainly do not find a lot of in many autobiographies of conservatives!
Leary's writing is lively, intelligent and hopeful - a friendly warning to all drug warriors that it is possible to live a productive, intellectually fruitful life while participating in moderate psychedelic "research" and consumption.
The thing I like best about this work is that it is a hallmark of the true libertarian spirit. Leary smiled quite often during his life despite the fact that the power and control freaks tried to keep him down every day. Leary was a proud humanist and his spirit shall live on in many of us.





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I currently use TextSpeaker 3.2, which converts Word files to WAV files, and then they are converted to MP3 format. After much testing I have determined that this permits a much better quality than simply allowing TextSpeaker to convert the files directly to MP3. I create the Microsoft Word files (and therefore the audio files) with some care by placing periods after all titles and sections for natural pauses, as well as the elimination of the title contents pages and any citations that would not normally be found in an audio book, and I have included footnotes that would generally be included within an audiobook.

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