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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

By Tom Wolfe
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test Tom Wolfe s much discussed kaleidoscopic non fiction novel chronicles the tale of novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters In the s Kesey led a group of psychedelic sympathizers around

  • Title: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
  • Author: Tom Wolfe
  • ISBN: 9780553380644
  • Page: 232
  • Format: Paperback

    • Tom Wolfe s much discussed kaleidoscopic non fiction novel chronicles the tale of novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters In the 1960s, Kesey led a group of psychedelic sympathizers around the country in a painted bus, presiding over LSD induced acid tests all along the way Long considered one of the greatest books about the history of the hippies, Wolfe sTom Wolfe s much discussed kaleidoscopic non fiction novel chronicles the tale of novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters In the 1960s, Kesey led a group of psychedelic sympathizers around the country in a painted bus, presiding over LSD induced acid tests all along the way Long considered one of the greatest books about the history of the hippies, Wolfe s ability to research like a reporter and simultaneously evoke the hallucinogenic indulgence of the era ensures that this book, written in 1967, will live long in the counter culture canon of American literature.

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    About Author

    1. Tom Wolfe says:
      Wolfe was educated at Washington and Lee Universities and also at Yale, where he received a PhD in American studies Tom Wolfe spent his early days as a Washington Post beat reporter, where his free association, onomatopoetic style would later become the trademark of New Journalism In books such as The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe delves into the inner workings of the mind, writing about the unconscious decisions people make in their lives His attention to eccentricities of human behavior and language and to questions of social status are considered unparalleled in the American literary canon.He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.Tom Wolfe is also famous for coining and defining the term fiction absolutecmillan author tomwolfe

    Comment 827 on “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”

    1. Kaya says:
      You know those books that blew your mind in high school Like Siddhartha or anything by Bukowski or Nietzche and you read it in a cafe trying to look cool to the older hippies who ran the place and one of them sleazed up to you and said, you have beautiful skin and gave you a copy of Tom Wolfe s book on the Merry Pranksters and tried to get you to go out back and smoke a suspiciously tangy looking joint which you delcline but take the book, and read it and are briefly tempted to run off to a comm [...]
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    2. Jonathan Ashleigh says:
      I think this should have been half the length Most pages seemed as though Tom Wolfe was simply describing some seventies hippy picture in as much detail as possible It would have been effective if he just showed me the picture.
      Reply

    3. Jeff says:
      On the bus or off the bus The trolley glided along the tracks Hovering, floating, flying The ticket checker, his name tag read Mitchell, had the head of a warthog Feed the bee , he said What Jeff seemed trapped in a powerful time space vortex His hands looked rubbery, like Plastic Plastic Man But drawn by a meth freak A bunny, half gold, half silver, Day Glo halo, blood dripping from its fangs Feed the bee , she said Feed it now It s hungry Jeff turned to the other passengers I just want to grok [...]
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    4. John Hampton says:
      These nut jobs actually came to Houston with their bus and parked it two doors down from my best friend in Houston Around 1969, moon, Led Zeppelin touring, people taking LSD and sitting on the hill in Hermann Park staring at the sun My older brother and sister would drag me along to look at the hippies then the next day in the paper would be another story of a young Houston man who had become blind forever by roasting his retinas with pupils wide open looking at the sun Guess I should have given [...]
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    5. Fabian says:
      A mega doozy A unique fauxdopey emblem of hippie Americana that blows angelic trumpets in your face with the celebration of a dadaesque topsy turvy rover s lifestyle So, oh so VERY unique Is it all nonfiction Really Or is it a horror film in disguise no, no, just hear me out wherein body snatchers captivate the fragile minds of the youth, ensnaring them in major LSD consumption, intersubjectivity, codependent thinking and a fantastical creation of genuine communal attachment The hippies were a g [...]
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    6. Paul Schroeder says:
      This book was a huge disappointment It s hard to believe that a book that included so many interesting people, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsbergh and Neal Cassady just to name a few, could be so tedious and uninteresting Wolfe s descriptions are clunky and monotonous This is a guy who is about as square and straight as they come attempting to describe to his readers what it was like for Kesey and the merry pranksters to be high on acid and most of it reads like a hollow impersonation of Jack Kerouac The [...]
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    7. Rebecca McNutt says:
      I love anything to do with the hippie movement I m looking at the era through idealist eyes but it was such a time of great change, great music, great clothes and freedom After my midterm on Tuesday I was lucky enough to find an old 68 edition of this book being given away for free at the student trade shelf, and it was excellent Bizarre, funny, interesting and unforgettable, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test is one of the strangest things I ve ever read but also one of the most addictive stories [...]
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    8. Alex says:
      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 bus, discovering LSD and inventing the psychedelic movement, come off like Stanley or Shackleton explorers in new lands, leading a ragtag but brave band of adventurers into dangerous frontier territory T [...]
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    9. Charlie says:
      First time around, this book positively made me want to try acid Jury s still out on that one, folks.
      Reply

    10. Michelle Curie says:
      I don t want to be rude to you fellows from the City, but there s been things going on out here that you would never guess in your wildest million years, old buddy Oh, to having lived in the Sixties All the things people whisper and get reminiscent about today comes alive in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test It certainly was a ride, in the most literal sense of the word.I mean, this book is nuts Crazy Insane Tom Wolfe presents his experience of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, who trave [...]
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    11. Maria says:
      My favorite idea presented in the book A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying Once, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react One thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that You can t go any faster than that We are all doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching amoviesof our lives we are always acting on what has [...]
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    12. gaby says:
      This book was okay Tom Wolfe was always an outsider, a New Yorker, even a gasp Yalie He was never really on the bus if you know what I mean But for a square, he explains the scene pretty well The pranksers were like the scenesters of any era self absorbed and fairly boring pricks It is an interesting book for one fact if nothing else it s kind of the only book written in the 60 s about the 60 s HS Thompson didn t really get rolling til the early 70 s Hells Angels came out in the 60 s, but it was [...]
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    13. Erik Graff says:
      This is one of the popular books of adolescence 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 as a teenager.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 re [...]
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    14. Eric K. says:
      I had a brief interaction with Tom Wolfe last November.He came to speak to my class in one of those rare Oh wow, Columbia Journalism might be worth it moments Inexplicably, he started in on a lengthy out of context run about how the New York Sun was a disgrace of a newspaper I happened to be working there as a reporter at the time and hating it , it was one of those surreal coincidences that seem to happen to me on an eerily regular basis He asked for questions, my hand shot up first, and I pref [...]
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    15. Sketchbook says:
      Did the Man in the White Suit have Sweet Tooth pushers In the 60s he teased through his hat, to great acclaim his liberal dose of saucy irreverence bursts with a briskvein of low humor He injected the comic strip into dailyjournalism scribbles and it became his pet province Meanwhile,he remains a sort of modest church lady Some of his pieces are swell he s at his best when he s at his waggiest for henever reaches wit As a New Journalist, he dares to probe inner thoughts of others beware he s an [...]
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    16. Evan says:
      I swear for a good long while I was seriously considering giving this book two stars for Wolfe s disingenuous pseudo hipster spontaneity, a la Kerouac but with bells on the style and tone were actually kind of making me roll my eyes and cringe And then there are the Merry Pranksters themselves I can t quite tell if I just outright loathe them or actually begrudgingly envy them doing whatever feels good in the now I tended to use to romanticize hippies uncritically, but have come to see things wi [...]
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    17. Jenny says:
      You re either on the busor off the bus This is the choice facing you as you begin to read Tom Wolfe s classic saga of Ken Kesey s Merry Pranksters as they test the boundries of consciousness and test the limits of other human s patience What is almost as amazing as the lengths to which the pranksters went to enjoy their existence on Earth, is the style that Wolfe has chosen to narrate the adventures Brillliantly blending stream of consciousness writing and a journalistic sense of description, Wo [...]
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    18. Elyse says:
      I read this book and The Right Stuff when a yoga friend, no less , recommend I read Tom Wolfe Before knowing of Being older late to the party never considered this book when I actually lived in Berkeley attending Cal during the early 70 s , what I enjoyed most about both this book and The Right Stuff was the historical trip down memory lane of a culture that comes around once in a lifetime Tom Wolfe is another one of those talented odd balls funny witty crazy What s not to like a small diet of T [...]
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    19. Djinnaya says:
      excerpt from a history paper I wrote on this book, which I posted to dcbooks While the book doesn t hold answers, it is a great read for anyone who has ever been part of a subculture It puts the story out there in a way that is honest and fair, showing not just the idealism, but also the grime and the violence and the difficulties of rebellion against the norm and the inherent dangers in basing a movement on a mind altering drug It might be easy to reject the story as a tale of mistaken adventur [...]
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    20. Rick Skwiot says:
      I had forgotten successfully how pretentious, pseudo intellectual, self absorbed, and self righteous hippies were Maybe, as a full fledged member of the If It Feels Good Do It Generation, I was subconsciously embarrassed by my own pretentiousness, pseudo intellectuality, self absorption, and self righteousness in those days.But I recently restored my suppressed memory by hooking down Tom Wolfe s The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, first published in 1968 The book I had avoided for thirty years desp [...]
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    21. Nat says:
      I have Tom Wolfe s aesthetic taste figured out He likes exuberance He doesn t like ascetics Asceticism is unamerican.In The Right Stuff, he prefers Yeager and the test pilots to the astronauts who don t get to really fly their capsules In From Bauhaus to Our House, he loathes the European modernists Mies et al and he likes FLW and Saarinen In The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, he sides with Kesey and the Pranksters with their undoctrinaire deployment of LSD and technology against other psychedelic [...]
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    22. Andy Miller says:
      I was assigned to read this book in college 1975 I couldn t finish it, it seemed to be so.poorly written I tried again this year as I ve just reread Kesey s books and On the Road This book focuses on a bus trip organized by Ken Kesey and driven by Neal Cassidy the real Dean Moriaty in On the Road shortly after Kesey finished Sometimes a Great Notion and the bus ride is basically one long acid trip I read it this time as an interesting history of compelling characters from a fascinating time, th [...]
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    23. John Wiswell says:
      The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test is best if you blow through the first fifty pages and take your leisure with the rest There s equal information in the introduction as in the meat of the story, but less of the fun, and a little cruelty to the real people behind Wolfe s new journalism report After the introductory portion, where you meet the cast and understand the premise, you re treated to hundreds of pages of episodes, some as short as two pages long, about radical artists, set free to roam in [...]
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    24. Jesse says:
      I had no idea about the sort of person Ken Kesey was the only frame of reference I had was his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo s Nest This book, or epic journalistic adventure by Tom Wolfe, chronicles Kesey s adventures after the publishing of his first two books the other Sometimes a Great Notion, had just been finished Kesey had been involved in CIA sponsored drug tests, which included such recreational fun things as LSD, mescalin and cocaine The CIA knows how to party The Merry Pranksters, Kes [...]
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    25. El says:
      ETA Supposedly Gus Van Sant is working on making a movie of this book, slated for 2011 Much like Kerouac s On the Road, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test was one of those books that I tried several times to read and always failed miserably to get through the first chapter I made it a priority of mine now to sit down with it and read the effing thing Side note I have a notebook I ve kept for a really long time in which I started writing down books I wanted to read when I worked at a used bookstore [...]
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    26. Judy says:
      After finishing Back to Blood, I felt curious about Tom Wolfe s beginnings My beginning with Tom Wolfe was reading The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test in 1969 I married my first husband in April of that year and we set out on our honeymoon which was really a glorified road trip across the country from Ann Arbor to San Francisco, inspired by Kerouac s On the Road We camped the whole way, intending to end up as teachers in a free school in San Fran Reading Acid Test was our preparation, our Rick Steve [...]
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    27. Pudge says:
      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 [...]
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    28. Rachel Hope Miranda says:
      From Seventh Grade on still now I found myself absolutely fascinated by the 1960 s and the freedom of the era Every time a school project came about, I would find some way to focus it around this time period, which leads me to convincing my mother to purchase this, Tom Wolfe s The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and many other books At the time I first read this Seventh Grade I completely and utterly did not understand it I found myself attempting to look cool by bringing it with me everywhere Years [...]
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    29. Bill says:
      I m still boggled that it took me until a few weeks ago to read this book or anything by Wolfe I also will posit that a good deal of my enjoyment derived from interest and lack of moral judgment over the drug fueled lifestyles depicted in this book However, even removed from those contextual constraints, this book was an amazing account of the west coast acid revolution.What I found most striking reading this book some four decades after the events it depicts took place is how many niche, or sub [...]
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    30. Jenny (Reading Envy) says:
      I ve been trying to finish this for a while If the experience of reading it wasn t so much like an acid trip itself, I might be able to get past halfway Each chapter starts out like a story but slowly devolves, sometimes into sheer chaos I m interested in the people being talked about, especially after reading On the Road, but I just can t slog through I may come back to it.
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