The Delicious Grace of Moving One's Hand: The Collected Sex Writings

Rating:
Summary: Trippy tome
Review: "Turn on, tune in, drop out" the trinity of tripping, the credo of the sixties' psychedelic revolution, was coined by the "High Priest" of LSD, Dr. Timothy Leary. Though his Harvard research into the consciousness-raising possibilities of psychedelic drugs might have ended with his, and Richard Alpert's, dismissal from the school-the first faculty to be sent packing since Ralph Waldo Emerson-Leary went on through private funding to research mind-expanding drugs, especially as related to sexual ecstasy.

The Delicious Grace of Moving One's Hand: The Collected Sex Writings, compiled by Leary before his death in 1997, includes lectures, interviews, essays, and personal history that reveal this man's remarkable wit and brilliant scientific mind. The words here are just as often gorgeous prose as they are lucid scientific postulations. He writes of his "first sexual experience"-his own conception-in gorgeously erotic terms: "I was eased into this soft, creamy home, my slim serpent body sputtering with pleasure."

Accessible even to Leary novices-including those of us under 40, many likely born long after Leary's escape from prison in 1970-Delicious Grace will tune you in and turn you on to one our country's most ingenious, controversial minds.

Rating:
Summary: Food for thought
Review: I read this book a few years ago (knowing almost nothing about Timothy Leary, except his status as a 60's icon) and really enjoyed it. It helped me to redefine the way I think about pleasure and society's relationship to it. I was raised with such a puritanical "if it feels good, it must be evil" way of thinking that Leary's point of view - "if it feels good, it's probably good for you" - was downright liberating for me. Although I don't subscribe to everything Leary says in the book (for example, I don't think doing LSD once a week is a good idea), his essays are always provocative and full of food for thought. Even if you're put off by Leary's associations with hippie and drug cultures, I'd still recommend reading this book. Leary was an intelligent man with ideas worth listening to.