The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Softcover

Tom Wolfe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553264915 ISBN 13: 9780553264913

Publisher: Bantam Books, 1981

Synopsis

Vintage paperback

About this title

Review

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

From the Publisher

"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the book...the pushing, ballooning heart of the matter...Vibrating dazzle!"
--Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times

"Among journalists, Wolfe is a geniune poet; what makes him so good is his ability to get inside, to not merely describe (although he is a superb reporter), but to get under the skin of a phenomenon and transmit its metabolic rhythm."
--Newsweek

"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is an amazing book...A book that definitely gives Wolfe the edge on the non-fiction novel."
--Village Voice

"A Day-Glo book; illuminating, merry, surreal!"
--The Washington Post

"Some consider Mailer our greatest journalist; my candidate is Wolfe."
--Studs Terkel, BookWeek

"Tom Wolfe is a groove and a gas. Everyone should send him money and other fine things. Hats off to Tom Wolfe!"
--Terry Southern

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Publication date: 1981
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0553264915
• ISBN 13: 9780553264913
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 372