Jesse Walker reviews 'Tripping on Utopia'

Jesse Walker's comments on Benjamin Breen's book, Tripping on Utopia, attracted some discussion in the comments for my recent blog post.  Jesse's review of the book has now become available at the Reason magazine website. 

I don't think the sole focus should be on Jesse's review, particularly as he is kinder about Tim Leary than other reviewers. Charlotte Shane's review for the New York Times is available here.   The book also was reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books. (The headline for that review is "Timothy Leary Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.") Publisher's Weekly also reviewed it. 

'John Lilly was a creep'

 

John Lilly 

There apparently was quite a dark side to John Lilly, the dolphin and consciousness researcher whom Robert Anton Wilson wrote about. 

On X, Jesse Walker writes, "John Lilly was a creep. He bragged to a military audience that he could do dolphin experiments 'that one could not do with man without getting into severe moral, legal, or ethical problems.' Then he wrote a book calling dolphins 'humans of the sea.' "

Jesse links to an article written by historian Benjamin Breen, the author of a new book on LSD research I mentioned recently.  

Jesse notes that the quote he mentions does not appear in the article he linked to, but does appear in  Breen's Tripping on Utopia book, which Jesse reviews in the latest issue of Reason magazine. I'll link to the review when it appears online.

The article Jesse links to says the "most unsettling feature" of Lilly's research "was the fact that his dolphins kept dying." It says that Lilly relied on "using pain to control animal behavior."

And this New  Yorker article says four of the seven dolphins Lilly gave LSD to died.