Well researched and fully documented, this is an essential resource for anyone investigating Huxley's life. At a few points, it appears to offer some valid correctives to Sybille Bedford's better-known biography. As a book, however, it's dry as dust, with short, almost cursory-seeming chapters, a prose style so simple as to be boring, and an overall impression of Cliff Notes. The author has contributed significantly to the study of Huxley's classic 20th-century life, but is unlikely to excite anyone into wanting to know more. ( )

This book goes fairly rapidly through Huxley's life. This may be at least in part because of the loss of Huxley's papers and letters in the fire that destroyed his home in California. But the reader gets a good sense for the goodness of the man (with a few pecadillos), the diversity of his interests (poetry, literature, science, sociology, travel, eastern religion and new ideas) and the challenges posed by his damaged eyes. He was the co-inventor of the term psychedelic. I like his motto, aun aprendo ("I am still learning"), and that in his younger days he would take encyclopedias with him to read on his travels. ( )