Very different experience reading this at age 44 as opposed to 14, but still a very interesting and enjoyable read.

LOL. I don’t usually LOL in a review but… LOL! I laughed more than I have in a long time while reading a book. I literally had a blast. Apparently the original Magic School Bus was a 1939 International Harvester purchased by author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) in 1964 to carry his "Merry Band of Pranksters" cross-country, filming their counterculture adventures as they went. They painted it up in the most ridiculous multicolored, Day-Glo, paint job ever seen on a school bus or a microbus. What happened on that trip and afterword is the subject of Tom Wolfe’s deep dive into the psychedelic world of the acid heads.”

I think I get it, this whole new journalism thing, (not so new anymore) after reading some of the work of Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion and now this book, I’ve come to realize that this is a form of journalism where you don’t just step back and report the facts with cool objectivity (an impossible task for a human anyway) you dive right in and become a part of the story, merge with it, become one with it. As a form of actual journalism I can’t say if that’s the best way to do things but it’s sure as heck an entertaining approach.

I’ve been fascinated with the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s since I was a little kid and saw bunches of flower children hitchhiking by the side of the highway from the window of our bus as we Greyhounded it out to my grandparent's place. I was told by some less than kindhearted elders that if those people ever got their hands on me they’d hang me from a meat hook and eat me. Hippies were scary!

I’ve never taken hallucinogenic drugs and never plan to but there’s just something fascinating about that era. It was so much fun reading about the Merry Pranksters running around horrifying straight-laced America with their antics, naïvely believing that LSD and similar drugs were somehow the answer to the world's problems. It reminds me of the early days after the discovery of electricity when everyone from scientists to poets believed that lightning contained the secret of life.

One of the funniest parts of this book, for me, was when Kesey got up on stage in front of an earnest antiwar rally and let the air out of the proceedings by telling them that, with their rallies and marches, they were behaving like fascists and that would play into the hands of the authorities so they should just chill out and forget about it. They were all so shocked. It was hilarious.

This is one well-written, immersive journey into the trippy, slightly offputting, frequently ridiculous, and occasionally sincere world of the 1960s drug culture. I'm not sure how informative it was but I sure was entertained.

An absolute slog. What was an interesting subject to begin with derails into the author writing as if he's on the acid trip with the merry pranksters, overwrought inside jokes, and strangely used punctuation. Hoo boy am I glad to be finished this one. I guess I'm just off the bus.

weird and good. he has a special talent for describing the psychedelic experience in the most disgusting ways possible. like watching some brightly coloured larval spawn erupt on an attenborough documentary. a lot of talk about plumbing. it was great

Tom Wolfe coined the term “New Journalism” to describe a genre of writing that abandon the conceit of objective journalism, placed the writer firmly within the story, and used forms more commonly seen in creative literature than in traditional journalism. (Along with himself, he included in this category Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and others.) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is definitely an example of the New Journalism, and should be examined within that context.

It would have been hard to do justice to this story with a more traditional journalistic approach. Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, and the whole West Coast psychedelic counterculture was so far out from the experience of most Americans at the time that conventional journalism had no chance to tell the tale. Essentially, what Wolfe did by putting himself inside the story and describing it in hippy lingo like an ongoing acid trip was to attempt to show the experience rather than to tell it.

How you react to this story and the style in which Wolfe tells it depends on several variables, not least of which is how old you are and your disposition towards the subject. I was much more taken with the book when I read it at 25 than reading it now at 59. Maintaining the style of a manic trip throughout the entirety of the book wowed me then, but grates on me now. I also find myself far less sympathetic toward principle characters than I was then: an overwhelming hubris appears to be Kesey’s defining characteristic, while Cassidy comes across far more ragged and desperate to me now than the cool I saw then. Also, I was reading this book simultaneously with Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind where he goes into detail of the promising psychedelic research that had been underway since the early ‘50s and that was halted/set backed/killed by the brutal backlash to the Dionysian counterculture that Kesey and his acid heads personified. That context definitely shaped how I read the book this time around.

Still, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a major cultural artifact of a unique time in our history. It remains an important story — just not the far out blast that I found it on my first time through.

So I’m glad I finally got around to reading this, inasmuch as it does tell a pretty wild story about a time when all of this was very much on the vanguard. Also wild to think about a time before LSD was illegal, ha. I’ve read much more about Leary and Alpert and that side of psychedelics, and then the later years in San Francisco, but this was a different account. Tom Wolfe does an effective job at being a journalist but also conveying that hallucinogenic feeling.

That being said, I spent much of the book rolling my eyes and just wanting to say, just stop. The attitudes toward black and gay people were also troubling, not to mention just how many teen girls they were regularly with. “Oh haha we absconded with a minor in Canada but she liked to wear just her underwear and she was into it!” I mean, I get these were different times, but still. Perhaps not the best book to read in one’s mid-30s in the #metoo era.

Finally, my sister lived in La Honda for a time, and it’s pretty hilarious to think of that sleepy town in the forest being full of these shenanigans.

20 years after I initially read... and over 50 years since its publication - this has been one of the most important books in my life.

Tom Wolfe is an astute angelic observer. He describes the journeys/trips, Kesey's magnetic personality, the actual vision of the Pranksters (which they themselves couldn't describe) and he accurately observes the foibles, mental breakdowns, the PARANOIA! and how could anyone make Neal Cassady come to life like he does.

I wonder if the word has lost value as a medium because of its limitations, but no movie or YouTube clip has been able to match my understanding of the counter culture movement of the 60s.

There is much to like: the pure joy at the center of Prankster life, the revulsion of middle class values, the experiments with group consciousness, dropping out of the political games, the outfrontness about personal hangups, and the oddball American-esque quest of the group which Kesey claims is like apple pie.

In the end, this is a cautionary tale. Bordering on the cult, the Pranksters come apart and Kesey lives out his days on a farm in Oregon. The drug craze proves to be destructive. LSD becomes illegal and only in recent years has cannabis become accepted.

But their efforts to find a new art (in their lives) proves to be an illuminating challenge for groups of humans who are striving towards a shared goal. And their mark, which is against the establishment and most of the 300 million+ souls living in America is indelible.

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 brisk
vein of low humor. He injected the comic strip into daily
journalism-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 he
never reaches wit). As a New Journalist, he dares to probe
inner thoughts of others; beware : he's an Externalist.
Keep peeling an onion and you're left with nothing but aroma.

n  "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..."n

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 traveled across the United States in a colourfully painted school bus named Further. In the 60s they became famous for their use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs and unknowingly lay the foundation stone for the rising hippie movement.

n  "Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologise about. What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip."n

The book today is also seen as an important representative of the New Journalism literary style. The as-if-first hand account of Kesey and his followers makes you feel like you're part of the gang and it's surely a crazy drug-filled life they led. On their journey they meet up with people like Allen Ginsberg and Neil Cassidy, encounter the Hells Angels and the Grateful Dead, are chased down by the police and flee to Mexico, only to find out that it's just not the same thing there.

I also didn't actually know about the Acid Tests before reading this. The title was given to a series of parties that were held in the mid-1960s, where LSD (often put into the drink Kool-Aid, hence the title of the book) was taken to abandon the real world and reach a state of intersubjectivity.



Books written in seemingly effortless, stream-of-conscioussness style, often have the ability to convey a rawness and intensity that overly polished narratives sometimes lose in their process of editing. This one didn't evoke the comfort of Dharma Bums in me, or the wanderlust of On the Road, but it had its own craziness, documenting the transition from the Beat-Generation to the Hippie-Movement.

"I believe there's a whole new generation of kids. They walk different... I can hear it in the music... It used to go life-death, life-death, but now it's death-life, death-life..."

Having that said, it's an achievement how Tom Wolfe, who was never truly "on the bus" (he claims to never having taken LSD and only smoked marijuana once) made you feel like you're part of the experience throughout the entire book. If that's a thought that tickles your fancy, this one is for you.

The author uses problematic descriptors of minoritized groups, and while it is hard to tell if this is his chosen language or merely his conveyance of the Pranksters' chosen language, it's problematic and uncomfortable nevertheless. White, heterosexual, cis men are at the forefront of this book and seemingly this historical moment. These men are generally difficult to like. I did appreciate some of the symbolism and patterns, which I would not have recognized had this book not been for a class. Who knew nonfiction could have symbolism? I also appreciated how the writing tone varied, and always fit the tone of the scene very well. That was impressive on Wolfe's part. I can't agree with Wolfe or this book as a revolutionary moment in journalism/writing, but maybe if I had read it at the time of publication I would? But it didn't totally suck. 2.5 stars.

DNF 47%
It is baffling how such an interesting subject matter can be made so dull simply through choice of prose. And that is the main accomplishment of Tom Wolfe here, as he took the topic of Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, and fledgling time of the hippie movement, traveling cross country in a florescently dayglo painted school bus, ingesting more LSD and a panoply of other drugs than would be considered reasonable by even experienced users, and Mr Wolfe managed to make it dreadfully boring. I would be impressed if I wasn't so disappointed.

The salient points of my criticism

1. Misguided prose
This makes or breaks the quality of a work for me. And the way this prose was written was in a winding and drolling stream of consciousness style. Wolfe seemingly wrote this in a style where he is attempting to mimic the feeling of an acid trip, and the way he additionally messes with typography and punctuation to try get this affect is interesting, but the result is a jumbled and confusing mess that quickly loses its novelty after a few chapters.
The issue, if this emulation was his intent, is that Wolfe never tried any of the substances he was attempting to emulate the effects of. So it comes across as stilted and artificial, like a child who has never consumed alcohol trying to emulate being drunk. Just more what he imagined it would be like.
It pales in comparison to, for example, the frenetic and crazed writing of Hunter S. Thomson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where there is no doubt that Thomson's writing is an emulation of the experiences that he had and had lived. I guess that is the distinction between Wolfe's New Journalism and Thomson's Gonzo Journalism. Wolfe tried to write it to make the reader feel like they're actually there, whereas Thomson actually was and can achieve that through a recounting of events*
I believe it would have been much better if Wolfe wrote it in a much straighter manner, and refrained from attempting to make a statement with his verbiage.

To be considered also, I am personally not a fan of stream of consciousness style of writing (Having just come from reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I heavily disliked due to this style), so that factor of taste needs to be taken into account.

2. Uncritical View
The book serves almost as a hagiography, never venturing any level of criticism of the actions of the Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Because while reading, there are many things that I felt were brushed aside, with things like sanitation and the involvement of children only brought up in passing. Heck, there is even a scene where the visiting Hells Angles run a train on a girl, where it isn't exactly clear that she's in a state of mind to have any say in the matter, and it is presented in the same tone of "O golly gee, just look at these crazy zany hippies and their wild groovy lives! Aren't they just zonked out of their minds lol" that the rest of the narrative is structured around. Never does Wolfe step back and attempt to add qualification to the celebratory view he gives the Pranksters, or questioning the cult like nature of the group and Kesey's influence over the members.

3. Lack of detail
The parts of the history and narrative felt so disconnected from each other, and when something new came up it felt like not enough time was spent to really care about any of it. It was more like little individual vignettes of wackiness that weren't coherently related to the overall story. The chapters could better be summed up with sitcom episode titles like "The Pranksters visit Timothy Leary", "The Hells Angles come to the Pranksters" or "The Pranksters take over a Unitarian Convention", which each little episode not having the time to delve into the issue being presented at hand.

Conclusion
One of my favorite books of all time is The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro, where he takes what is ostensibly one of the least exciting topics you can find, dealing with the nuances and intricate details of the process of building highways, bridges, and parks in New York City. But then he details how it was dominated for decades by a single man, and proceeds to elucidate the fascinating and infuriating facts of how it all came to be, giving all topics brought up the time needed to really have the reader understand the time period and the significance of every action, writing in clear and incisive prose which beautifully flows off the page and keeps you engrossed in the arc of the tragedy, from the idealistic and promising rise to the fall in pervasive corruption of his entire character. Even over the 1000+ pages.
The reason I bring it up is that it is the opposite of what i found in this book. I could only imagine what a figure like Robert Caro would has been able to do with the same subject matter, contrasted with Wolfe taking us on what he imagined an LSD trip would be like. This book is sparse on detail, and the prose is so jarring that it becomes difficult to really connect with anything in the story. I found myself not caring about any of the characters involved, as there was no real junction from one little story to the next. It didn't feel like there was any purpose of reason for some of the portions outside of being able to namedrop some famous person of group. It feels like an opportunity to tell a truly interesting story was squandered.

*: caveat, that "Fear and Loathing" is more based on true events than a completely accurate retelling. Many of the events happened, but they weren't structured in the same narrative that is presented in the book.

I loved taking this ride with the Merry Pranksters, especially when my tour guide was Tom Wolfe.

Sure he was one of the founders of New Journalism. But what thrilled me wasn't merely the verve and exciting texture to his writing.

What else didn't thrill me most? It wasn't just Tom Wolfe's in-your-face narration, in contrast to the relatively diffident narrators who preceded him -- often equally accomplished, just not so in-your-facey.

What a match Wolfe's writing was for the Merry Pranksters, come to think of it!

So, What Did I Love Most?

What I loved most was how Tom Wolfe put himself -- all 200% of him -- into every page. Actually I found that to be a feature, not a bug. Not only in this "Electric" book but in all his fiction and nonfiction that I've read.

Tom couldn't help being an immersive writer of immersive books, no more than he could help himself from looking SO GOOD in his amazingly flattering, trademark, white suits.

Some writers strive hard to be originals. Tom Woolfe didn't have to try. He simply was. And so he wrote that way.