<TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>White Hand Society</TitleText> <Subtitle>The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg</Subtitle>

City Lights Books transfers@onixsuite.com 20130919 eng

COM.ONIXSUITE.9780872865358 03 01 City Lights Books 01 GCOI 87286100592520 02 0872865355 03 9780872865358 15 9780872865358 BC <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>White Hand Society</TitleText> <Subtitle>The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg</Subtitle> 1 A01 Conners, Peter Peter Conners Peter Conners is author of the memoir, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (Da Capo Press, 2009). His other books include the prose poetry collection Of Whiskey and Winter (White Pine Press, 2008) and the novella Emily Ate the Wind (Marick Press, 2007). His next poetry collection, The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees, will be published by White Pine Press in spring 2011. Conners is the publisher of BOA Editions, a Rochester-based Pulitzer-Prize- and National-Book-Award-winning publishing house. 01 eng 200 00 200 03 20 Allen Ginsberg;beat generation;peter conners;psychedelic;timothy leary 01 In 1960 Timothy Leary was not yet famous — or infamous — and Allen Ginsberg was both. Leary, eager to expand his experiments at the Harvard Psilocybin Project to include accomplished artists and writers, knew that Ginsberg held the key to bohemia's elite. Ginsberg, fresh from his first experience with hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico, was eager to promote the spiritual possibilities of psychedelic use. Thus, "America's most conspicuous beatnik" was recruited as Ambassador of Psilocybin under the auspices of an Ivy League professor, and together they launched the psychedelic revolution and turned on the hippie generation. White Hand Society weaves a fascinating and entertaining tale of the life, times and friendship of these two larger-than-life figures and the incredible impact their relationship had on America. Peter Conners has gathered hundreds of pages of letters, documents, studies, FBI files, and other primary resources that shed new light on their relationship, and a veritable who's who of artists and cultural figures appear along the way, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Thelonious Monk, Willem de Kooning, and Barney Rosset. The story of the "psychedelic partnership" of two of the most famous, charismatic and controversial members of America's counterculture brings together a multitude of major figures from politics, the arts, and the intersection of intellectual life and outlaw culture in a way that sheds new light on the dawn of the 1960s. "Through the years City Lights has brought us seminal work by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and now, this detail-rich double bio of Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. I knew both these men pretty well, and the times intimately, and Peter Conners has been true to it all. I don't know how he amassed the trunks of data he must have used to find the jillions of details which were new to me, but I'm certainly glad that he did. This book wins a well deserved spot on my shelf, and belongs with anyone who wants an intimate view of the Sixties-Seventies spinning of the Great Wheel of the Dharma." —Peter Coyote, actor/author, Sleeping Where I Fall "Peter Conners has given us a wondrous tale of picaresque adventure and authentic friendship – between Leary the trickster-explorer-scientist and Ginsberg the activist-bard-philosopher, two seminal figures who pioneered new pathways through the cultural maelstrom of the sixties." —Ralph Metzner, co-author, with Ram Dass & Gary Bravo, of Birth of a Psychedelic Culture "The Psychedelic Revolution of the Sixties began with the meeting of two visionary explorers into the unmapped regions of inner consciousness — Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. In the White Hand Society Peter Conners charts the course from the earliest dirt roads of laughing gas to the superhighways of LSD in one compelling story. It is a thrilling ride on what Ginsberg called the Trackless Transit System, going where no one else had dared venture. Take this as a new kind of guidebook into the mystery of the mind." —Bill Morgan, author of Beat Atlas: A State by State Guide to the Beat Generation in America and The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation "Peter Conners' White Hand Society is a gripping account of a key event in 20th Century history, the decision to actively promote strong psychedelics to the population at large. Conners tells the Timothy Leary story from the traditional perspective of the West Coast counterculture, but he emphasizes the egalitarian influence that the Beat movement had on him and, in particular, the huge Blakean personality of Allen Ginsberg. The result is a portrait of two remarkable figures who came together and changed our culture forever." —John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary 02 How Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary launched the psychedelic revolution together: the inside story. 08 "Conners writes like a poet and researches like a scholar. He pored over hundreds of letters, FBI files and other primary sources to shed new light on these two avatars of altered consciousness. He argues convincingly that Leary 'would have just been some square Harvard professor' without the introductions and connections that Ginsberg provided." San Francisco Chronicle 08 "At first glance they seem to be an unlikely pair, the iconoclastic, highly radical Allen Ginsberg, eager to break down many of the conventions of his times, and the Ivy League college professor, Timothy Leary, all collar and tie and with a career in academia ahead of him. Yet Leary reinvented himself and took a path that was, at least for a time, to make him as much a radical figure as Ginsberg. In 'White Hand Society' Peter Conners investigates the coming together, the alliances that these two figures had for a time. It is a story of the 1960s that flowered briefly as America's secret services closely monitored the duo as they threatened to play a significant part in breaking up society as it was." Beat Scene 08 "Conners maps the trail of where Ginsberg's paths intersected with Leary’s over three-hundred readable, well-paced, straightforward pages." Popmatters 08 "Leary's life, and his fruitful collaboration with the poet Allen Ginsberg, has been illuminated in Peter Conners' recent study, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, an engaging narrative which spans several decades, as well as the entire U.S., with side trips to Europe and North Africa." Prague Post 08 "The text itself is clearly and engagingly written, and Conners has a flair for dramatic effect. One can easily imagine him doing successful oral presentations of segments of his book for appreciative audiences." --William Lawlor, Resources for American Literary Study. Resources for American Literary Study 08 "A full account of the two 1960s icons who made it their cause to launch the psychedelic age. . . . an entertaining overview of an era whose echoes still ring." Kirkus Reviews 08 "Conners (Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead) splendidly brings these two mavericks [Ginsberg and Leary] back to life as he chronicles that first meeting at Leary's house and traces their growing bond as they built the bridges between the 'holy trinity' (Albert Hofmann, the father of psychedelics; Aldous Huxley; and William Blake) of visionary consciousness expansion and the 1960s psychedelic movement." Publishers Weekly 08 "Combining strong archival research (especially in the Ginsberg archives at Stanford) with a narrative flair that animates, say, a lecture Leary made in Copenhagen into something out of Kinsey. Conners traces Leary's progress from philandering West Coast researcher to psychedelic convert and Harvard lecturer alongside Allen Ginsberg’s progression from clean-shaven Blakean to hirsute Blakean. On the way, the two join forces to convince the Youth of the virtues of acid." Washington City Paper 08 "The White Hand Society is a truly exciting book in the sense that Conners has managed to bring forward the pulsing energy of those exciting times and textually reintegrate the feelings for a modern audience. And, on a personal note, I've always found Ginsberg and Leary’s individual stories fascinating but having them presented in conjunction not only makes a lot of sense, it makes a wonderful read." Psychedelic Press 08 "White Hand is notable for both the tremendous amount of new information it provides and they way that it's presented. Conners not only tells us the whens and whys but he does so by-way of a seamless narrative that puts history into relevant perspective. Obviously, Conners instinctively understands the sensibilities of both Leary and Ginsberg and he writes from the 'inside,' giving a voice to the secret details of a movement that would come to influence the course of every art form." Electric Review 08 "This is an important addition to the literature on the beat generation, documenting the collaboration between two remarkable visionaries who took America on the ride of her life. If you're a beat generation fan, a hippie, a child of the 60s, or a fan of biographies, you'll be turned on by White Hand Society." The Daily Beat 23 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100592520/extras/WhiteHandExcerptCL.pdf 04 03 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100592520/images/87286100592520L.jpg 07 03 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100592520/images/87286100592520S.jpg 30 07 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100592520/extras/conners.whs.interview.MP3 http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100592520 City Lights Publishers 01 City Lights Publishers 20101115 08 16 oz City Lights Books 01 WORLD 20 20101115 01 02 16.95 USD