cover image The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary

The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary

Susannah Cahalan. Viking, $32 (352p) ISBN 978-0-593-49005-1

This vibrant biography from journalist Cahalan, author of The Great Pretender, chronicles the life of Rosemary Woodruff Leary (1935–2002), a prominent figure in the 1960s psychedelic movement and Timothy Leary’s wife from 1967 through 1976. She was a high school dropout and two-time divorcée in 1965, when she met Timothy while visiting Millbrook, N.Y., where the former psychologist ran an “acid commune” studying psychedelic drugs. Fleeing an abusive relationship, Rosemary joined the Millbrook community and struck up a romance with Timothy, whose tendency to view women as free domestic laborers and sex objects put a strain on their relationship. Delving into Rosemary’s many run-ins with the law, Cahalan describes how two drug-related deaths on the Southern California commune where Rosemary and Timothy lived in the late ’60s resulted in police raids and Timothy’s conviction on marijuana possession charges. He served only a fraction of his 20-year sentence, however, because Rosemary arranged for the Weather Underground to break him out in 1970. She spent most of the ensuing decades dodging American law enforcement by traveling throughout South America and the Caribbean until her outstanding warrants were expunged in the 1990s. Cahalan uses Rosemary’s stranger than fiction story to offer a vivid portrait of how flower power cracked up in the ’70s. It’s an electric account of a remarkable life and the end of an era. (Apr.)
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