“Absolutely mesmerizing, and difficult to put down, this exciting book expanded and enriched my understanding of how Harvard’s legendary psychedelic research team turned on the world, and beautifully preserves this largely unknown information for future generations. Birth of a Psychedelic Culture fills an important niche in the documentation of psychedelic history, and it sparkles with precious insights and illuminating wisdom.”
David Jay Brown, coauthor of Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse and Mavericks of Medicine

" The book you’re about to read – and I recommend that you actually do – is a saga of holy heroism. The people you’ll meet in it were like the Lewis and Clark of the Mind. But it is also a cautionary tale and contained within it is a lot of the real reason that America had such a visceral immune reaction to our sudden, terrifying and transforming “Otherness” in the middle of its consciousness … And here we all are. Now. Ready at last with the patience, forgiveness, contrition and selfamusement necessary to continue the work in earnest. It is a good time to go back to the beginnings of the revolution still underway and take stock. It is a good time to read this book. Now."
Excerpt from the Foreword by John Perry Barlow, former Wyoming rancher, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, cofounder and vice-chair, Electronic Frontier Foundation

"...a fun evocative history of 20th century psychedelic bohemia." --Michael Simmons, High Times

"Someday, when people speak of the Psychedelic Age as they do of the Atomic Era, the Space Age, and the Personal Computer Revolution, the period 1960-1966 at Harvard's Center for Research in Personality and New York's Millbrook Estate will be central to the conversation. PhDs Leary, Alpert / Ram Dass and Metzner revolutionized an Ivy League psychology department with experimental shamanism during the height of the Cold War era and followed that up by launching a version of Hesse's utopian Castalia Foundation in the guise of a psychedelic commune. They devised novel experiments to study the transformation of the human mind altered by psychedelic drugs available for the first time in history in precise doses.

They introduced the highly useful concept of "set and setting," and published scores of papers documenting and analyzing sessions (“trips”) conducted with graduate students, prisoners, theologians, intellectuals, artists, “beat” writers and jazz musicians. Transformed from Organization Man styled button-down neuronauts into new wave shamans, these three academics profoundly influenced Western culture despite a relentless push-back by hostile educators, sheriffs and drug agents looking for easy targets, a media that delighted in mocking them, and ultimately the full weight of the United States government challenged by a turned-on youth culture that refused to march in lockstep during the waging of a disastrous war."--Michael Horowitz Co-author of The High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs; Co-founder, Director of Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library

For anyone interested in the history of the psychedelic movement, the psychology, the characters and the culture of the Harvard branch, this book is invaluable. Forty to fifty years have passed since the events described took place and yet there is an unsettling freshness about the problems that the individuals and the culture faced, which resonate right down to the modern day. Yet, all the while reading, one also senses the warmth that those involved still have in their memories and which flower gracefully throughout the text. Highly recommended.--Psychedelic Press, UK

“Birth of a Psychedelic Culture is the ultimate insiders’ guide to the genesis, flowering, devastation, and re-flowering of one of the most significant eras of consciousness expansion in U.S. history. Through a series of revealing interviews and first-hand accounts, academic outlaws Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and company are revealed to be a thoroughly complex bunch—funny, poignant, angry, sincere, learned, naïve, and impatient for enlightenment. Much to our delighted edification, they broke on through to the other side and, at least most them, lived to tell this unforgettable tale. Synergetic Press has created an attractively produced work worthy of its fascinating subject. It is both stunningly designed and brimming with a wealth of rare, candid photos capturing a daring crusade the grail of which continues to shape our perceptions of reality today.”--Scot D. Ryersson & Michael Orlando Yaccarino,