About this title: Tom Wolfe's THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST is one of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, revolutionizing the way the reporters wrote about the world. This seminal work of the New Journalism, a style which explored the writer's own experience of the journey rather than merely reporting the bare facts, was written in a mind-bending barrage of words perfectly suited to the adventures of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched out on the "Transcontinental Bus Tour." Starting on the West Coast in 1964, Kesey and the Pranksters, a group of friends and hangers-on, set ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. 0553264915 Mass Market Paperback, Condition: Good; somewhat worn, with some underlining/highlightling within; will work well as a reading copy. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books, New York
Date Published: 1969
Description: Fair. No dust jacket. Text is clean and unmarked, but lightly yellowed. Covers have some corner and edgewear, creases, tears and rubbing. Solid Reading copy only. viii, 372 p. 18 cm. A Bantam book, Q4717.. read more
Description: Very Good. 0553380648 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
"This is one of the popular books of childhood which I didn't get around to reading until an adult, inspired, in part, by having seen the movie version of Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest. I would have liked it more as an adolescent.
Now, forty some years after publication, Electric is a bit of an historical curiosity. As much as the writings of Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert or Alan Watts, it substantially contributed to the creation in the public's eye of the counter-culture. As a kid I would have read it as a celebration. As an adult I read it from a greater distance, as someone else's loud party which got a bit out of hand.
In the popular imagination the psychedelic phenomenon started in the labs around Harvard on the East coast and amidst psychotherapeutic communities on the West, used primarily by intellectuals, then spread throughout America like a virus out of a research lab. This book gives an account of one of its more spectacular courses through the heartland, linking West to East and, incidentally, the countercultural generations of the fifties and sixties, the beats and the hippies.
As the outline above suggests, the real source of the psychedelic movement were the laboratories of governments and major pharmaceutical corporations, but, like the Andromeda Strain, the stuff got out of containment and the promised truth serum and miracle cure for addiction became instead 'all things to all men'--anything from the road to god (or Satan), to the party drug of choice."
"I tried reading this when I was 16 and really didn't have any cultural reference point for the material.
Over 20 years later, I knew most of the players in Tom Wolfe's non-fiction account of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.
It still took me quite a long time to read.
What is so impressive about it to me is that it really takes any remaining romanticism the Bay Area hippie era might still hold. The people are likable enough, and you have to give them credit for their enthusiasm, but ultimately, it seems like their endeavors were relatively pointless. Of course, they aren't pointless if for nothing less than they represent, to an extreme, the experimental thinking of the time. That kind of growth was needed, even if I callously say it was ultimately without true merit.
It is essential reading if you are interested, like I, in putting all of the accounts of the era together like a puzzle."
"Let me preface this review by saying I was not alive in the 60's, and I never talked to my parents about their experiences, yet through this book, I feel as though I shared in the madness that were the Acid Tests. Tom Wolfe's masterpiece "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," is an absolutely amazing book written about a group of Hippies hell-bent on spreading they're organized chaos throughout the nation. Apart from the subject matter (which I'll get to) this book is as well written as you could imagine. Somehow, Wolfe captured the experiences of the Merry Pranksters with his writing style. His use of the elipses (...), run on sentances, and his insightful commentary actually puts the reader into this experience. The experience itself is a whirlwind journey accross the US, in a cloud of pot-smoke, a rush of speed and a series of mescaline and lsd induced hallucinations. All the while, this seemingly nonsensical journey is carefully laid out as only Wolfe could have done. To read a book about 15 men and women that travel the nation not knowing right from left, Wolfe explains everything in stunning imagery and intense detail. Whether or not you approve or liked the hippies movement, and even if your offended by drug related subject matter, you should read this book. As a purely literary work, it's easily top 10, and as a story of the acid movement and a historical look at the 60's, there's none better."
"Kesey unabashedly gives the modern reader a look at the psychedelic movement- before it was a movement. I was hooked from the beginning- 'Cool Breeze' and the rest of the Pranksters were too amazing. ::grins:: And the way they handled the cops- by being friendly and honest- awesome too! LOL The element of surprise is always key. Brightest blessings to everyone who reads this- may your journeys be twice as wierd, and twice as loving and positive as the Pranksters'."
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