Electric Kool Aid Acid Test
Ken Kesey was a Golden Boy -- scholar, actor, star athlete, one of the outstanding novelists of his generation. But his life took a turn. He did drugs, publicly and flagrantly, and became the 1960's incarnation of all that was meant by "hippie." Tom Wolfe turned a tour with Ken Kesey and his...
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Ken Kesey was a Golden Boy -- scholar, actor, star athlete, one of the outstanding novelists of his generation. But his life took a turn. He did drugs, publicly and flagrantly, and became the 1960's incarnation of all that was meant by "hippie." Tom Wolfe turned a tour with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters into THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST. He recounts their romp across America in the first psychedelic bus, their alliance with the Hell's Angels, their conversion of the biggest anti-Vietnam rally of all time into a freak-out, their games of hide and seek with the law -- all with a depth and inventiveness that makes this book one of the most memorable journalistic odysseys of our time.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
0553234587
Publish date: February 1982
Publisher: Bantam Books
Edition language: English
Category:
Classics,
Non Fiction,
Autobiography,
Memoir,
Biography,
Writing,
History,
Literature,
American,
Literary Fiction,
Journalism,
Culture,
Contemporary
"What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip."What Ken Kesey is is a prick, so let's not get any delusions about that. But most great leaders are pricks, and the case Wolfe is making in this masterful biography is that Kesey, in his way, was a great leader. His early days on the Furthur...
He got me inside their heads, which is no mean feat. Fantastic.
At the time I read this I was enchanted with Wolfe as a journalist. In retrospect, his response to the subject matter seems not quite right. He's a debunker who yearns to believe, I think, not the aloof observer he thinks he is.
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