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Synopsis
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 out in a converted school bus driven by Neal Cassady, heading for New York, where Kesey's book SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION was due to be published. Along the way, they introduced acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks and staged impromptu jam sessions with the Warlocks (who later became the Grateful Dead). They stayed one step ahead of the law as they made their way across the country, with Kesey wanted for marijuana possession by numerous agencies, including the FBI. They also met some of the most revolutionary figures of the day, including Dr. Timothy Leary, Terry Southern, and Allen Ginsberg. Wolfe's style, word usage, and vivid descriptions of these events have introduced much of the vocabulary of the Sixties into popular culture and entered the public consciousness to such a degree that THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST has become, for many people, the final word on the era.
| Size | | Height: | 7.0 in | | Width: | 4.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 6.4 oz |
Industry Reviews
"I had a terrible time writing the article [that became 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test']. Right away it ballooned into a three-part series. The first part, setting the stage, worked out O.K. The second and third were pretty thin stuff. Certainly they failed to capture the weird...fourth dimension I kept sensing in the Prankster adventure. I saw Kesey out on California after the stories came out, and he said, 'They're all right. They'll ...intrigue people.' ...I finally sat down and wrote Henry Robbins, my editor at Farrar, Straus Giroux, and told him I had to follow the Prankster story to the end, no matter how long it took....I wrote most of it at such a burst that to this day I have no perspective on the book."
New York Times Book Review - Tom Wolfe (08/18/1968)
"[]till has its high points, though from this late-'90s, substance-free perspective the acid trips of 30 years ago don't seem worth all the Day-Glo descriptive effort."
Howard
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