Blog: Leary manhunt book an interesting look at recent history

SANDUSKY — Are you looking for an interesting and entertaining work of nonfiction? Try "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD."The book, penned by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, is the best nonfiction book I've read in months, an oddball adventure story and vivid slice of American life during a difficult period of American history.If you think the Trump presidency is a scary and unusual moment in American history, you might feel better when you get a dose of what life under Nixon was like. Dissent was very vivid during the Nixon years, with radicals exploding bombs across the country.Timothy Leary (1920-1996) might be a mysterious name if you are a young person, but in his heyday he was famous as an advocate for the life-changing properties of LSD who coined the phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out."In later life, he successfully predicted the age of the Internet by telling journalists that life would be transformed by personal computers connected into a network. When he died of cancer, a personal website chronicled his final days.The book focuses on a little over two years of Leary's life, from the time that he escaped from a California prison in September 1971 to his capture in Afghanistan in January 1973, and reads more like a thriller than a biography.Leary's prison escape was financed by a $25,000 donation to the terrorist Weather Underground by Leary's admirers in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a hippie drug smuggling outfit. Weather Underground members who assisted in the escape included Bernardine Dohrn, and Barack Obama's acquaintance, Bill Ayers.After his escape, the Weather Underground helped Leary slip out of the U.S. After a brief stop in Paris, he went on to Algeria, where he discovered that life with the Black Panthers and Eldridge Cleaver could be very scary. After a sojourn in Switzerland, largely spent feverishly ingesting a variety of illegal drugs, Leary was finally captured when he entered Afghanistan.The book has the tension of a thriller, but also comes alive through a series of often funny, often appalling anecdotes. Even as he pushes the War on Drugs to burnish his law and order image, Nixon drinks heavily and secretly bugs the White House, capturing conversations that eventually were his undoing.Leary's companion, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, drinks the sacred water of the Ganges that Leary's daughter has brought back from India. She contracts hepatitis from the dirty water and her body turns bright orange. Leary dyes his white hair to be less conspicuous when he flees for Afghanistan, but the couple is too stoned to follow the directions, and when he boards the plane, his hair is a bright purple.Debate still rages whether Leary was a hedonistic opportunist with little loyalty to anyone or a philosopher with ideas that still challenge and stimulate open-minded readers.Within the span of a few years, he endorsed the Weather Underground's violence and then denounced Bob Dylan and the youth movement in the pages of William F. Buckley's "National Review." Both stances were convenient at the time and were later recanted.Yet Leary also comes across as an interesting idealist and proponent of thinking for yourself. He was undoubtedly a vivid and talented writer, and he influenced other interesting writers and thinkers. His interest in space migration, intelligence increase and life extension anticipated the efforts of contemporary figures such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Although "The Most Dangerous Man in America" focuses on a narrow and particularly harrowing slice of Leary's life, it offers a memorable portrait of the man.Timothy Leary in 1989