With the Beatles

September 19, 2005
Nearly 40 years late and awfully short, Harper's
editor-in-chief Lapham expands on his 1968 two-part magazine report on the Maharishi Mahesh's ashram in Rishikesh, India—oh, and the Beatles were there, too. Then a young journalist writing for the Saturday Evening Post
, where the articles that form the basis for this book originally appeared, Lapham was dispatched to India to get the scoop on a budding hippie craze—transcendental meditation, or TM—and the slightly built, eternally grinning (and moneymaking) yogi who had won some very high-profile converts, including the exhausted Beatles, folk singer Donovan, Mia Farrow (then Mrs. Frank Sinatra) and Beach Boys singer Mike Love. Despite a short description of a lengthy taxi ride with Ringo Starr, the Beatles are barely evident in Lapham's text beyond the occasional sighting or stray guitar chord lilting through the Indian air. There are some marvelous photos of the Beatles, many taken by a young follower of the maharishi named Paul Saltzman who published them in his own book in 2000. Even with these shots, however, Lapham's surprisingly ordinary, at times self-important prose, will disappoint if not flat-out bore readers expecting anything close to what the title might suggest.