"Hackers: Heroes of the Computing Revolution" is probably the most common source for those who "weren't there" about AI Lab, and it paints a story of the lab being destroyed by Symbolics, proprietary software etc. - I have personally seen the meme of "AI Lab hackers got bought out" with referrals to the book itself.
What a lot of people don't know is that one of the descriptions used by RMS to talk about how "AI Lab lost people", the story of how he couldn't meet people at lunch, isn't because they left AI Lab for "evil corporations". It was because a lot of people avoided RMS, especially after lawsuit often considered more crucial for the creation of GNU than the Xerox printer story (Stallman violated Symbolics-MIT source licensing deal).
From better sources, I have met two AI Lab members from 1970s - one even claimed to have been RMS' supervisor back when RMS was Harvard Undergrad working part-time (and if certain war story is to be believed, is indirectly responsible for Emacs happening) - the impression left was that a lot of RMS' AI Lab contemporaries wouldn't shake hands with him since 1980s.
Heard also interesting stories on RMS' mismanagement of early Hurd initiative and how it resulted in close to 0 work being done.
(No, Levy's book was not honest to the facts)