Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna, by Graham St. John, The MIT Press, 548 pages, $35
A large crowd filled the Scottish Rite Temple in downtown Los Angeles to hear the man who first synthesized LSD speak. It was October 2, 1988. The bill for the evening—"Albert Hofmann in America: Celebrating 50 Years of Consciousness Research"—was stacked: Alongside the grandaddy of LSD were such psychedelic celebrities as Laura Huxley, John Lilly, Stanley Krippner, and Andrew Weil. Hunter S. Thompson and Timothy Leary were both in the building. The master of ceremonies, introducing Hofmann with a rallying cry for a new era of psychedelic research, was Terence McKenna, arguably the movement's most eloquent spokesman.
