The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tom WolfeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-08-19
ISBN: 031242759X
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Book Review: Before raves were "in" there were acid tests
Summary: 5 Stars
Tom Wolfe does an admirable job of getting close to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He follows them through varied adventures and chronicle such activities as the meetings of the Pranksters and Leary's Harvard group. A glimpse of the early Wizards acid test concerts is given also. The Wizards continued on afterwards for years as the Grateful Dead. Encounters with the Hells Angels are visceral and brutal.
This book is one way to get a glimpse of what was going down when people were turning on at the acid tests.
Summary of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
"An American classic" (Newsweek) that defined a generation. ?An astonishing book? (The New York Times Book Review) and an unflinching portrait of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, and the 1960s.
They say if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. But, fortunately, Tom Wolfe was there, notebook in hand, politely declining LSD while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters fomented revolution, turning America on to a dangerously playful way of thinking as their Day-Glo conveyance, Further, made the most influential bus ride since Rosa Parks's. By taking On the Road's hero Neal Cassady as his driver on the cross-country revival tour and drawing on his own training as a magician, Kesey made Further into a bully pulpit, and linked the beat epoch with hippiedom. Paul McCartney's Many Years from Now cites Kesey as a key influence on his trippy Magical Mystery Tour film. Kesey temporarily renounced his literary magic for the cause of "tootling the multitudes"--making a spectacle of himself--and Prankster Robert Stone had to flee Kesey's wild party to get his life's work done. But in those years, Kesey's life was his work, and Wolfe infinitely multiplied the multitudes who got tootled by writing this major literary-journalistic monument to a resonant pop-culture moment.
Kesey's theatrical metamorphosis from the distinguished author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to the abominable shaman of the "Acid Test" soirees that launched The Grateful Dead required Wolfe's Day-Glo prose account to endure (though Kesey's own musings in Demon Box are no slouch either). Even now, Wolfe's book gives what Wolfe clearly got from Kesey: a contact high. --Tim Appelo
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