The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon, and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis (2018)
Giving the title in full saves me the trouble of explaining the main contents of this entertaining book. If you lived through the early 70s, you will revisit through this book many of the curious features of that time. Leary was doing a 10-year stretch in a California prison after police found two roaches in his car (!) He was in a minimum security prison and got over the wall by pulling himself hand over hand across a power cable. The Weathermen helped him get out of the country, and he fled to Algeria, where his first refuge was with the Black Panthers, headed by Eldridge Cleaver -- not a fun guy at all, in this account. Nixon, meanwhile, was trying to bolster his law and order image, and gave various federal agencies the task of bringing Leary back to the states. The chase went on for nearly two and a half years, and Leary's adventures in the underground took him to Egypt, Lebanon, Switzerland, and Afghanistan. The undercurrent of the book is humor. Dr. Leary comes off as a shallow hedonist, pathetically eager to be Captain Trips to the youngsters. Nixon is just Nixon, playing up the War on Drugs, which as we all know was a knockout of a government program. The book reads fast, and it's as pleasant a pastime as eating a double-scoop chocolate chip ice cream cone. Two tidbits to entice more readers to this title:
1- There is a good deal of description of the Black Panthers compound in Algeria. If you're female, you'll count yourself lucky to not have been one of the wives or mistresses of Cleaver and the other men who ran the place.
2- My favorite scene concerns an extradition flight near the end of the book, and how two prisoners decided to celebrate their last couple of hours of freedom. I don't often laugh out loud while reading, but the authors' wording here is killer.