Even those who do not like Laing will love Beveridge's book about Laing. The reasons to relish this book? It does not convert non-believers into believers, but it contains a wealth of data, and contextualizes Laing's iconoclastic ideas about psychiatry into the currents of his times. Beveridge convinces us that Laingianism was a reaction to the excesses of 50s' era biologically based psychiatry, and that it was spiced up by a wide range of influences, from Buber's I and Thou, to Anton Chekhov's Ward No. 6, to his native Scotland, with its divided Highlands and Lowlands, plus his psychotic mother.