Review: White Hand Society by Peter Conners

Originally published by City Lights in 2010 'White Hand Society -- The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg' is authored by Peter Conners. The book takes a refreshing look at psychedelia's most culturally potent point of history to date. Conners has previously published a memoir entitled 'Growing up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead', the novella 'Emily Ate the Wind' and a collection of poetry called 'Of Whiskey & Winter'.

A number of books have been published of late dealing more exclusively with Timothy Leary and his Harvard colleagues like Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass,) Ralph Metzner, Frank Barron and alike; however, by shifting the focus to Leary's relationship with poet Allen Ginsberg, Conners has created a far wider historical-cultural context; indeed a wider countercultural context. The beauty of this, as we shall see, is to connect the psychedelic movement with some of the wider cultural shifts that had been developing since WW2. Not only, for example, does this perspective plug directly into the Beat generation but simultaneously into the political and social upheaval of the mid-to-late 1960s.