Wednesday, January 10 at 7PM
Authors
BILL MINUTAGLIO & STEVE DAVIS
speaking & signing
The Most Dangerous Man in America
ABOUT THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA
On the moonlit evening of September 12, 1970, an ex-Harvard professor with a genius I.Q. studies a twelve-foot high fence topped with barbed wire. A few months earlier, Dr. Timothy Leary, the High Priest of LSD who’d advised young people to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” had been running a gleeful campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Leary’s friend John Lennon had even written him a campaign song, recorded by the Beatles as Come Together.” Now Leary is six months into a ten-year prison sentence for the crime of possessing two marijuana cigarettes.
Outside the prison, America is in turmoil. Antiwar demonstrators are massing by the tens of thousands, homemade bombs are exploding everywhere, and Black Panther leaders are threatening to burn down the White House. Inside the Oval Office, President Richard Nixon is veering into uncharted waters, drinking his way through sleepless nights as he widens the war in Vietnam and plots to unleash the United States government against his ever-expanding list of domestic enemies.
Leary’s escape from prison, aided by the radical Weather Underground, is the counterculture’s union of “dope and dynamite,” aimed at sparking a revolution and overthrowing Nixon’s government. The President brands the fugitive Leary as “the most dangerous man in America.”
For the next twenty-eight months, Nixon orchestrates a madly careening, global manhunt — a chase that winds its way among homegrown revolutionaries, European aristocrats, rock stars, a Black Panther outpost in socialist Algeria, an army of FBI and CIA agents working both sides of the law, Watergate co-conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, an international arms dealer, hash-smuggling hippies from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and secret agents on four continents. Deeply researched from freshly uncovered primary sources and new firsthand interviews, The Most Dangerous Man in America reads like a gonzo, drug-addled modern American thriller.
ABOUT BILL MINUTAGLIO
BILL MINUTAGLIO not only co-authored the PEN award winning DALLAS 1963 (Twelve), he also authored FIRST SON: George W. Bush & The Bush Family Dynasty, (Times Books); CITY ON FIRE: The Explosion That Devastated A Texas Town and Ignited A Historic Legal Battle, (HarperCollins); THE PRESIDENT’S COUNSELOR: The Rise To Power of Alberto Gonzales, (HarperCollins); IN SEARCH OF THE BLUES (University of Texas Press). He co-authored MOLLY IVINS: A Rebel Life (PublicAffairs). Esquire named CITY ON FIRE, along with work by Ernest Hemingway, among the greatest tales of survival ever written.
ABOUT STEVE DAVIS
STEVEN L. DAVIS co-authored DALLAS 1963 (Twelve) with Bill Minutaglio, and is the author and editor of several acclaimed books. He is President of the Texas Institute of Letters and is a curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. He is considered "one of Texas' leading scholars of its indigenous culture" and his writing has been described as “lively,” “groundbreaking,” and “illuminating.” His previous books include TEXAS LITERARY OUTLAWS and J. FRANK DOBIE: A Liberated Mind.
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