HIGH PRIEST, PUBLISHED IN 1968 when Timothy Leary was forty-seven, is an account of Leary’s life from 1959 to 1962, a period when his research and social work was funded by Harvard, then transformed by psychedelics. Before reading the book, I had heard Leary dismissed as hedonistic and irresponsible. I came away from it with a different view of him—as a serious, careful, and inspiring thinker.

The book is divided into sixteen chapters, or “trips.” It begins with a thirty-five-year-old Leary leaving his job and “stage-prop home” in Berkeley, where he thought, acted, and drank martinis “like