“Confessions of a Hope Addict”

The Galician publisher, Roberto Ramos Fontecoba, had to come to rehabilitate for the Spanish market the seminal text of one of the priests of the counterculture, Timothy Leary (Springfield, Massachusetts, 1920 – Los Angeles, California, 1996), a psychologist from Harvard who researched enjoyed psychotropic substance and described by President Inquisitor Richard Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America”. Confessions of an addict about hope (1973) appeared in a pioneering way, but uncertainly, in 1978 by Star Books of Barcelona, ​​and now — that publication was long lost — Página Indómita is rescuing it from destruction with a new translation. It is an autobiographical text that collects one of the most exciting periods in Nick’s life LSD apostle (lysergic acid diethylamide), after a double prison sentence —twenty years in total— for possession of marijuana. Approaching the age of fifty, he decides that he cannot spend the rest of his life in prison, and immediately organizes an escape with the help of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the terrorist group Weather Underground, only to end up in Algeria with the support of the Black Panther and the National Liberation Front regime, which was in charge at the time a country that was considered a paradise for revolutionaries. This naïve rage will soon subside in Leary and he will turn to a certain skepticism in the face of these professional radical idealists. The story is full of humor and characters only imaginable in this age of lysergic punch, conspiracy freaks and CIA surveillance, and perfectly complements it Flashbacks. autobiography written by Leary a decade later and published in Spanish in 2004 by Alpha Decay.