As you might expect, it's as interesting as reading about other people's drug trips. Which is to say, not at all.

2.5/5 stars
Fascinating time in history... bridging the beats and the hippies. Although I find this period fascinating... I hoped this book would be better/more interesting. Again: this is important work... but I also just feel like Wolfe is an outsider painfully trying to appear to belong, and that most of these people aren't as interesting as we would be lead to believe...
Ultimately not that much really happens... The pranksters kind of all just act dumb... and then it fizzles out.

My god. Was this hard to read. It feels good to challenge myself with an author who disregards the common rules of structure to create exactly what he wants to create. He is reporting on these stories about such a confusing drugged up, misguided and well intentioned people and telling it straight just wouldn’t do justice to that. However I can’t reaaaally say I recommend unless u like a hard to follow narrative as a challenge. Also maybe would recommend to read this as a secondary book so you don’t get sick of it bc the difficulty level makes it easy to need a break. Very interesting though and I feel like I have learned a lot about acid and the early psychedelic scene in the 60s and also what “Hippies” really were.

Been so long since I forced myself to finish this--how could such an interesting subject become 300+ pages of wishing I could gouge out my eyes.

So you're new to the psychedelic scene and you're grooving with it. So you want to know about it, drape the trappings of a notorious decade upon your brain a shimmering web of counterculture lore. You bought Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to read but saw the movie instead, and while you were at it, also watched Oliver Stone's Jim Morrison biopic. You collared yourself with a hemp necklace, dreaming of dreadlocks. Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley were cool so you got a shirt. You heard about the Grateful Dead, took some songs to heart, and dug Pink Floyd. Ken Kesey... Ken Kesey who? The guy who wrote the book that the Jack Nicholson movie was based on?

One of the most underrated figures of the Flower Power Era, Ken Kesey died in 2001, after several feeble recreations of his glorious original journey. Literally a government created monster, Kesey emerged from the MKUltra Project with an expansive knowledge of alternative consciousnesses and the means of attainment. That, compounded with his experiences in the mental institution where he worked, Kesey saw that people who didn't fit in society were not really crazy but were triangles trying to fit into squares or vice versa.

So Kesey made a place where people could be up front, be themselves without judgement from others in the circle and thus were born the Pranksters. With the earnings from his first book, he bought some land in La Honda, California where he formed a society of people whose sole purpose was to be up front. Be yourself. People began to develop bizarre It was a grand experiment, and one day they set forth, no, further in a long road trip towards New York. Another underrated driving force in the narrative of the sixties and seventies is Neal Cassady, made famous as Dean Moriarity in Kerouac's On The Road. As in Kerouac's book, Cassady is a tireless marauder of the roads, and he was a vital component of that mad bus drive across the country.

Kesey singlehandedly, with the manic enthusiasm of his fellow pranksters, dredged an entirely new, vital movement from the corpse of the stagnant cold war mentality of the fifties. Without him, the seventies as we know it would not have existed. The Beatles wouldn't have their Magical Mystery Tour (a watered down albeit more popular version of the pranksters' journey). We wouldn't have had communal living. Acid rock (Kesey reportedly had to kick out Jerry Garcia for hanging out with them, like a Senior booting out a froshie. Later, with the Grateful Dead helmed by Owsley, the acid king, creator of the most potent acid in the world, Kesey's acid tests became popular. Kesey's lover Mountain Girl eventually went on to wed Garcia). Be ins. Happenings. Music technology. Mixed media shows. That decade as we know it, was shaped by the indomitable vision of a single man.

The end of The Electric Kool-Aid Test is heart-wrenching, with a vision crushed into oblivion, and a man going quietly into the darkness. I for one, would have loved to see the DSMO experiment succeed, and who knows how the world would have shaped itself after this?

Tom Wolfe manages to tackle an extraordinary difficult subject matter with his first venture into the entirely new and self-created gentre New Journalism, and he pulls it off. Have you seen him? The guy looks like he oughta be sipping from a pipe while sharing conversation with Mark Twain on a riverboat! I can't picture him getting down and dirty with hippies, but I reckon that's one of the coolest things about journalists. Wolfe draws the narrative from interviews and Kesey's open willingness to share the entire library of footage and recordings from the bus tour. He descends into the psychedelic psyches of the Pranksters, and does a magnificent job for someone who says he has never taken LSD before.

I originally planned to read this along time ago, but I kept putting it off. It's a good thing. For some books, there is a time and place to be read, and for me, ten years ago wasn't it. Now I am hesitant to pick up other masterpieces of Wolfe's, lest they don't shine against the light of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

I’ve wanted to read this book since I was a kid watching Gilmore Girls and saw Jess reading it in a scene. So random but it always suck with me! I got a cute copy of it at Half Price Books recently and it felt like fate!

The atmosphere of this book was, for lack of a better adjective, ELECTRIC! References to so many popular people/things from the 60s/70s. Even Beatlemania and the Grateful Dead.

I never knew this book was about Ken Kesey who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest! I always knew about the day that was the origins to “drinking the kool-aid” but that was about it! A wild culty trip! I also now feel like I HAVE TO read On The Road by Jack Kerouac. He’s another recurring character here!

My main concern with this book was my confusion with the narrator. Sometimes they’re an active member of the story and other times they’re never mentioned. But we never get explanation how this narrator even knows all of this. Was he on the bus the entire time? Why did they let him tag along? I left with answers AND questions. Also they’re EXTREMELY unkind to women/minorities in this book.

I don’t regret reading it! Cool nonetheless to know the history. My nonfiction pick of the month.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

This was my second read of this book. Having first read it in high school, I did not appreciate hippies or know much about Hunter Thompson or Ken Kesey. Having read other Tom Wolfe books like 'The Right Stuff' and 'Bonfire of the Vanities' that I consider to be American classics, I thought I'd give this one another go.

I can say now that being much older helps and that the writing is quite good - as one would expect. Wolfe's extraordinary ability to capture the counter-culture in that moment - the mid 60's - is impressive. In an odd way this book serves more as a history of the period than a great story.

I also enjoyed Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels which is a similar book about a similar topic written within the same year. Hell's Angels is more dramatic than the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe is still the better writer but the drama in TEKAAT is a little uneven - sometimes boring and sometimes seat of your pants exciting.

4 to 4.5 stars

There were definitely moments of this that I LOVED. Learning abt the Prankster adventures and all the crazy shit that went down was definitely cool.

The stylistic choices were really. Something! It made sense in the midst of all the transcendental / psychedelic moments that needed to somehow be expressed on the page to get Wacky with the writing, but I think about 100 or so pages of the repeating sentences and nonsensical ellipses could’ve been cut and I would’ve been MORE impressed with the experimental style overlayed onto nonfiction. As it was, it got so so tiring and so so ineffective by the end to read the long ass acid test / The Current Fantasy passages.

Glad I read, but would t necessarily recommend unless you are very into the subject and don’t mind a slower read.

Picked this up after a friend of mine (a reader, but not a book junkie- you know what I mean, fellow GR people, represent!) lit up with consternation upon hearing that I hadn't read this before. He's got a green thumb, ifyaknowwhatImean, and he was shocked that I hadn't yet gotten on the bus with Ken Kesey and the gang....

And what a bus it is! We've got the almost-unseen narrator (Tom Wolfe, naturally, though he really does keep his opinions and preferences more or less out of the picture and lets the story of the Pranksters pretty much tell itself- more on this later), the aforementioned Kesey, Neal Cassady, Mountain Girl, the same bunch of Hell's Angels that Hunter Thompson had tangled with a couple years back, and on and on and on and on with the Day-Glo and the dank, crash-pad-cum-movie-set that was the Further bus (45 hours of documentary footage!?) floors strewn with hippie debris and the pot busts and the manic, gleeful energy of whatever was fueling these rowdy, charming, fazed and frenetic pure products of America just a-goin' nutso...

Here are a few things one can look forward to, if one has an interest or some love for the dramatis personae (Melina Martin, looking in your direction....)

* I'm not the biggest fan of Tom Wolfe's social philosophy or aesthetic tastes or political affiliation or whatever but the guy can write, he can sustain a narrative that pretty much seems to go off the rails at any moment, and he can be a wonderful all-seeing-eye to the colorful chaos going down all around him.

I think that the real charm of the book is that it takes a Tom Wolfe- not a doper, not a hippie, not a radical, not quite a square- to really give the perspective some depth and counterpoint. He's bemused, he clearly likes the kids, and he's sympathetic to Kesey to the point of admiring the lad but he's also more than a little skeptical about the merit and potential for this whole 'Further' thing, which actually sets just the right tone.

I heard somewhere that he was covering a motorbike race or something for Esquire and he got so befuddled with his notes and impressions and recollections and such that in the end he told his editor that he just couldn't have the piece on time, sorry. According to legend, the frantic and desperate editor told him to just send him his notes and they could maybe work something out.

Wolfe did, he wrote "Dear Rick" or something on the first page and just let it blurt. "Rick" ended up loving it and publishing it as is, omitting only the first two words on page one...

This book reads a little like that.

* His portrait of Kesey is decidedly approving, multifaceted, vivid and surprising. I haven't read anything Kesey has written but I didn't need to. Wolfe puts his leading man in the midst of the caterwaul and lets him have a mind of his own, does't pigeonhole him or condescend, and actually Kesey comes off a little bit better off than some of his compadres. Kesey seems to believe in the essential value and rightness of his whole trip, but it's not hard at all to see the bullshit detector and skeptical intelligence that would make him a good novelist also limit his desire to follow this trip all the way down the line and to profoundly balk at being a spokesman for anybody, let alone a kind of perpetual psychic outlaw...

*....as somebody like Neal Cassady would, and did, continue to be. It's great to check up on the hero of On The Road and much of Kerouac's fiction (not to say the poetry of Allen Ginsberg) a few years after the Beat Generation turned fluorescent. There he is, everywhere and nowhere, shirtless, sweating, flipping a sledgehammer (!?) metronomically, only letting it fall when he senses a sudden disturbance in the force.

If you know a bit of his story you wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find him behind the wheel ;)

* A fun little slice of immersible sociology examining what happens when some freewheeling nogoodniks clash with the forces of Johny Law. Kesey's excursion to Mexico and inevitable high-tailing it outta there is one of the best sections of the whole book and you can feel Wolfe digging in and enjoying himself...

The old canard about the 60's goes like this: if you could remember the party, then you probably weren't there.

Wolfe seems to remember everything about the Further people pretty damn well....

So he wasn't really there...

So maybe there wasn't much of a 'there' there, at all, in the first place...

It feels like there should've been no way that a book about acid heads in the sixties riding around in a Day-Glo bus would be boring, but here we are. Strangely, I think if this book was fictional and Wolfe had gotten to write different people it would've been a lot better. Because the trouble with this book is not the writing. Wolfe is damn good. No, the trouble is the subject. Personally, I just don't think Ken Kesey or the Merry Pranksters - either then or now - warrant an entire book. It just does not hold up. They don't carry the weight of a book of this size and try though Wolfe might, he just can't make them as interesting as they might be. The stuff I love about new journalism - how a small cultural event reflects on the entire climate at the time - is all there, but it all falls short somehow. Kesey's story just isn't strong enough.

There are way better places to dip your toes into new journalism.

suh-noozefest alert ! at høre om folks lsd trips er omtrænt lige så spændende som at høre andre fortælle om deres tilbagevendende drømme. could not give less of a shit. og krummer tæer over litterære troper af mænd der kalder sig selv et navn

I posted before I finished the reread. Now I am taking away one of the stars for a couple reasons. One is Wolfe's self-indulgent hipster mind-flow (it gets tedious) and his poetry (heaven help us!). The other is the blatant sexism, especially the Hell's Angels gang bang sequence. Saying "she was a volunteer" and it was "her movie" doesn't really cut it in 2018. Also, Kesey starts to come off as a drug-addled asshole, prankster bombing a Vietnam protest in Berkeley. (In my mind, Kesey's mindless gambits don't diminish his earlier literary achievements: "Sometimes a Great Notion" and "Cuckoo's Nest." It's seems more like a case of another guru gone bonkers.)

Still, "Kool-Aid Rock Acid Test" is an archival gem. And Wolfe does get better as writer. "Bonfire of the Vanities" is my pick of the litter.