Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #497497 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Synopsis
Aleister Crowley, born in Victorian England to a life of financial privilege and religious bigotry, rebelled against his upbringing. He became a mountaineer, a bohemian, a writer of sensuous poetry and a practitioner of what detractors called "the black arts". He was an uninhibited explorer of global spiritual traditions combining ritual magic with spiritual ecstasy. His winding path intersected ceremonial magic, Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah, sex, drugs, poetry and music. This text provides an account of his life.

Customer Reviews

Fair Play For Wickedness
This is the quietest, most understated of the biographies of Crowley, something of an apologia, yet it undeniably includes a mass of information excluded elsewhere. There is no affected smartness or mockery at the expense of its subject, as one finds in Symonds, say, but a modest, quietly informative air that is fairly soothing considering the strange goings-on that unfold. There are masses of details on friends and associates of AC, like Meredith Starr, Aldous Huxley and A.N. Sullivan, and there are selective quotes from letters that are fascinating. Many details are clarified and explained, there is an incredible list of sources and bibliographical matter, and I rate this as highly useful, accurate biography.

A balanced biography
I've read most of the biographical and autobiographical literature about Crowley, but apart from "The Confessions" this is by far the best. It's extremely well balanaced and does not try to portray Crowley as a saint or a devil. The last few chapters are particularly interesting as most books don't seem to cover his later years. An excellent purchase if you want a more balanced look at Crowleys life.

The definitive biography.
Over the last few years a number of biographies of Aleister Crowley have appeared. Some good, some bad. But Richard Kaczynski's "Perdurabo:The life of Aleister Crowley" stands head and shoulders above all of them. I have read four other Crowley biographies but this is the only one I have read where I didn't feel I was being given a veiw of Crowley that was distorted by the authors own opinions. Mr Kaczynski presents the facts, and leaves it up to the reader to make his own mind up. Also Richard Kaczynski writes in such a way as to stir up real emotion in the reader. At some parts I was in fits of laugter and in others I felt real anguish for Crowley and his supporters. In my opinion this is the mark of a good author and a good book.
Another good thing about this book is that it does a good job of exposing a lot of the untruths and down right whoppers that were spread about by the gutter press of Crowleys time and are still being used to bash Crowley to this day.