Outside looking in

In 1943 LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney a psychology Ph.D. student and his wife Joanie become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a free-wheeling exploration of mind expansion group dynamics and communal living. With his trademark humor and pathos Boyle moves us through the Loneys’ initiation at one of Leary’s parties to his notorious summer seminars in Zihuatanejo until the Loneys’ eventual expulsion from Harvard and their introduction to a communal arrangement of thirty devotees—students wives and children—living together in a sixty-four room mansion and devoting themselves to all kinds of experimentation and questioning.