Storming Heaven: Lysergic Acid Diethylamide and the American Dream

by JayStevens (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1988

  $39.34

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $12.02

  To a generation of psychotherapists, LSD was a door to the unconscious. To the CIA, which purchased enough to turn on 100 million people, it was potentially a mind-control weapon. To Aldous Huxley, it was a force which could push mankind up the evolutionary ladder, a belief inherited by Dr Timothy Leary, who thought LSD would transform America into a spiritual Utopia. Storming Heaven begins in scientific investigation and ends in social and cultural revolution. With names like Henry Luce, Cary Grant, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, G Gordon Liddy and Charles Manson, the books examines a force which shaped contemporary America.

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $17.02

  Storming Heaven is a riveting history of LSD and its influence on American culture. Jay Stevens uses the curious molecule known as LSD as a kind of tracer bullet, illuminating one of postwar America's most improbable shadow-histories. His prodigiously researched narrative moves from Aldous Huxley's earnes attempts to open the doors of perception to Timothy Leary's surreal experiments at Millbrook; from the CIA's purchase of millions of doses to the thousands of flower children who turned on and burned out in Haight-Ashbury. Along the way, this brilliant novelistic work of cultural history unties such figures as Allen Ginsberg, Cary Grant, G. Gordon Liddy, and Charles Manson. Storming Heaven irrefutable demonstrates LSD's pivotal role in the countercultural upheavals that shook America in the 1960s and changed the country forever.