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The biographer's lot can be a thankless one. However much one endeavors to adopt the middle path of objectivity, the author will be condemned by some for excessive sympathy and rejected by others for the paucity of it. The more controversial the subject, the more passionate one's response is likely to be.
Daniel Burston's fascinating and oftentimes moving biography of R. D. Laing is a case in point. Laing was such an explosive and penetrating presence in American culture during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s that at the peak of his fame and notoriety he was the most widely read psychiatrist in the world. The originality of his thinking, combined with the merciless tone of his delivery, captivated a generation of college students, many of whom turned to psychology as if called by the power of Laing's vision. Laing, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher, imbued psychology with an irresistible measure of excitement and adventure. He threw a bomb on the pretensions of conventional psychiatry (and clinical psychology) and transformed the staid image of psychotherapy into a magnificent journey of self-exploration. His critique of social institutions, beginning with the family, was so subversive