Steven L. Davis

The fascinating true story of how Taos Pueblo’s Indigenous people recruited members of the famous Taos art colony to help spark a movement for Native justice that reshaped the nation. When the first white artists arrived in Taos by horse-drawn wagons, centuries of military conquest and brutal government policies had pushed Indigenous people to the brink of collapse. New Mexico’s pueblos had become some of America’s last holdouts of traditional culture, resolutely preserving their sacred lands in the face of mounting pressure. Many of the free-spirited newcomers in Taos came to admire the pueblos’ peaceful, communal societies and holy regard for the natural world. To these outsiders, pueblo civilization offered a marked contrast to America’s record of endless war, hyperindividualism, and environmental destruction. Among those attracted to Taos was the “Queen of Bohemia,” a wealthy New York heiress who dabbled in peyote and personified radical chic. Mabel Dodge Luhan fell in love with Taos Pueblo leader Tony Lujan and hoped to inspire an American spiritual renaissance based on pueblo values. She brought world-famous luminaries to Taos, including D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Carl Jung, along with the fiery social reformer John Collier. As the art colony gained international fame, the US government targeted the pueblos for extinction, moving to seize their lands and destroy their cultures. This same grim scenario had played out countless times before in US history. It seemed that nothing could stop the brutal crush of conquest. But the puebloans, who had once unleashed a fierce revolt against Spain in 1680, found a new way to fight back in the modern era. As master diplomats, they began recruiting the prominent creatives converging on Taos, shrewdly enlisting them as political allies. And these artists and writers, at a crucial moment in history, rose to join the pueblos and challenged their own culture’s prevailing genocidal policies. Beating Heart of the World is the fascinating, fast-paced chronicle of a long-shot resistance movement that grew into a powerful national campaign for Indigenous justice. While a work of history, Beating Heart of the World speaks urgently to our own era as new resistance movements percolate—and as new generations increasingly look to ancient Indigenous wisdom to help guide sustainable pathways forward.

On the moonlit evening of September 12, 1970, an ex-Harvard professor with a genius IQ studies a twelve-foot high fence topped with barbed wire. A few months earlier, Dr. Timothy Leary, the High Priest of LSD, had been running a gleeful campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Now, Leary is six months into a ten-year prison sentence for the crime of possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Aided by the radical Weather Underground, Leary's escape from prison is the counterculture's union of "dope and dynamite," aimed at sparking a revolution and overthrowing the government. Inside the Oval Office, President Richard Nixon drinks his way through sleepless nights as he expands the war in Vietnam and plots to unleash the United States government against his ever-expanding list of domestic enemies. Antiwar demonstrators are massing by the tens of thousands; homemade bombs are exploding everywhere; Black Panther leaders are threatening to burn down the White House; and all the while Nixon obsesses over tracking down Timothy Leary, whom he has branded "the most dangerous man in America." Based on freshly uncovered primary sources and new firsthand interviews, THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA is an American thriller that takes readers along for the gonzo ride of a lifetime. Spanning twenty-eight months, President Nixon's careening, global manhunt for Dr. Timothy Leary winds its way among homegrown radicals, European aristocrats, a Black Panther outpost in Algeria, an international arms dealer, hash-smuggling hippies from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and secret agents on four continents, culminating in one of the trippiest journeys through the American counterculture.