The Seeker, the Trickster, the Healer and the Teacher. Thus has the author characterized four men who changed our perception of reality and what was possible. Each chapter is broken into sections following the trajectory of these men: Timothy Leary, Trickster and showman; Richard Alpert, the seeker who made a pilgrimage to India and returned as spiritual leader Ram Dass; Huston Smith, a professor of religion who offered insight and an inclusive view towards all belief systems; and Andrew Weir, better known today as a promotor of holistic medicine. In the early 60’s three of these men were involved in the Harvard Psilocybin Project, an exploration of the mind-altering effects of LSD. Along each man’ path, we are led on side-paths involving Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, the man who synthesized LSD-25 in 1938 and made the world’s first acid trip in 1944. We also hear of the experiments in 1950 by Drs. Max Rinkel and Robert Hyde which were secretly funded by the CIA. At turns Leary is not as bad, but then again worse than we imagined. His and Alpert’s expulsion from Harvard in 1963 was spurred largely by a story in a college newspaper by then-student Weir, who in a nasty twist of irony would years later find himself in a similar situation. That expulsion basically took the leash off of Leary, whose antics led to the illegalization of LSD and to a lesser extent, to the War on Drugs. Thanks in large part to these four, the counterculture in the 1990s became our culture; way-out ideas like yoga, meditation, alternative medicine didn’t seem so far out anymore. Humor suffuses much of their antics over the years, reeling in subsidiary allies like author Aldous Huxley and poet Allen Ginsberg. The final pages touch on the author’s own excursions on his acid trips in the early 70’s, the first being an euphoric and the second a horrific trip whose effects lasted for weeks. Having been subjected to enough pot parties in the same time period, and a personal affront best spoken of in another blog…while I disagree with the whole ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ notion, I found much that was intriguing and humorous in this book.