Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Magick Life: A Biography of Aleister Crowley by Martin Booth:

Of the nearly innummerable Crowley bios I have read, this one may be the best for the curious layperson. Its facts are pretty solid throughout; and it is highly readable and well organized. The author confesses that he doesn’t know much about magick, and while that lack does show occasionally, his caution in that department rescues him from technical howlers that plague even such sage treatments as Kaczysnki’s Perdurabo. The tone of this book manages to stay in the wide middle ground between the derision of Symonds’ Great Beast (a.k.a. King of the Shadow Realm) and the adulation of Suster’s Legacy of the Beast. Unfortunately, it looks like its timing sucked: arriving just before Sutin’s Do What Thou Wilt, it was mostly washed under by the tide of Crowley bios. [via]

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