Reviews
“Clocking in at 394 pages jam-packed with in-depth information, factoids, anecdotes and insights from the first sentence to the last. A historical biography through and through, Lachman’s book is meticulously researched and it is quite easy to believe that the author, like a professor well-versed in their subject, could analyze and extrapolate at much greater lengths. The oft touted declaration of Crowley as the Wickedest Man in the World, may well have been overblown in it’s own time, but he’s certainly not an individual with whom it is easy to empathize. As detestable as he is, there is an undeniable fascination in his exploits, and Lachman seems the perfect man to deliver them.”
—The Examiner on Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll and the Wickedest Man in the World.
"Lachman creates a history of ideas that fascinates and excites"
– New York Journal of Books
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"The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination rejoins the parted Red Sea of modern intellect, demonstrating how rationalism and esotericism are not divided forces but necessary complements and parts of a whole in the human wish for understanding. Let’s be done, once and for all, with the shallow and misdirected notion that reason and mysticism are at odds. Lachman demonstrates their harmony."— Mitch Horowitz, PEN Award-winning author of Occult America and One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life.
“Colin Wilson came to a sudden and unparalleled celebrity with his first book, The Outsider, in 1956, and after that was strenuously ignored by every respectable critic. So much for respectability. Gary Lachman has written an intellectual biography of a writer who might be called the only optimistic existentialist, and done him justice. Wilson was always far better and more interesting than fashionable opinion claimed, and in Lachman he has found a biographer who can respond to the whole range of his work with sympathy and understanding, in a style which, like Wilson’s own, is always immensely readable. I enjoyed Beyond the Robot very much.” —Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy
“Russia is neither the West nor the East. It is both. And it participates in deep Christian mystical, indigenous, esoteric, and occult currents that were mostly lost or forgotten in Western Christianity and actively suppressed in secular modernity. In his new book, The Return of Holy Russia, Gary Lachman shows us why the return of these esoteric currents via the new (and old) claim of a ‘Holy Russia’ is so important, why such nationalist theologies cannot really be our answer, but also why particular Russian thinkers can point us in the right direction--toward a ‘third way’ beyond pure reason and past faith toward a new or future gnosis, or knowing-with, that ‘all is good.’ This sounds outrageous to many a modern ear, of course. Hence the importance of this book.” ― Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions
"It is no mean feat to make good sense of the Arcana and to cast light on the occult, but Lachman has pulled it off with this most engaging book. The Secret Teachers of the Western World is a very ambitious undertaking most successfully completed."
--William Irwin Thompson, author of The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light
"Lachman...manages to make basic concepts in esoteric philosophy and history lively as well as readable."
– Kirkus Reviews'
"One of the leading students of the western esoteric tradition, Lachman has published critical studies of Swedenborg, Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Rudolf Steiner, P.D. Ouspensky and Jung – and he has done so without being raptly worshipful or casually dismissive."– Washington Post
“Valentine witnessed the nights when Patti screwed Christ, when Hell blanked the world, when Verlaine sent guitar solos spinning slowly back into 19th century Paris…He got to argue with David Bowie and get drunk with Iggy Pop. What else is there to do?” – Paul Morley in the Guardian about New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation