The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

I thought this was a great book. Getting the inside scoop on this historical piece of history and wild guys and gals that made up The Merry Pranksters was extremely valuable to me personally. After reading many books of both the Beat Generation as well as the Hippie Era including a lot of works focusing on the bands, the signature artists of those times, this book is so important regarding the gap between the Beats and the Hippies. This book isnt sugar coated too much, so its raw, honest and exploratory. Learning in good detail about the Pranksters main/notable people, their ties to society and in contrast, their anti-establishment attitudes and spontaneous actions and unspoken rules, is to say the least entertainingly exciting. These folks were a large part in making the mid to late 60s what they were. As a Grateful Dead lover/DeadHead, it was more than enthusiastic learning about their late entry in this story, along with some amazing figures of the times including Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Ramrod, Neil Cassidy and of course, Ken Kesey (among many other critical historical persons who all had their part in shaping the counterculture gapping generations). A very quick read, and interesting for me to read about the pioneering psychedelic warriors, how they were Turned On and how they spread the message to the masses in such unusual form. The rebels of their time, along with some truly EPIC pranks, parties and perseverance. What I really enjoyed about this book is that it doesnt highlight a bunch of happy go luck good times. It shows the truly raw side of the bunch. It has some incredibly gloomy details that emerge as a result of being together as a wild family, with some eye opening realizations that are important for readers to know. That point being that even in best of times follows the worst of times. There is no light without darkness, Art is not Eternal, and a surreal vacation from the normal realm will at some point have you realize that sometimes a normal vacation from the never ending trip is important! So, I found this book to be a fun read, an important piece of literature linking the beats to the hippies, an incredible cast of real life people, and how far some rebels have to go to truly make their mark on society to push what they believe in without resorting to extreme violence.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I’d been meaning to read this book for years. Like all things of expectation, it wasn’t what I thought it would be. What ever is, really?

I struggled early with Wolfe’s prose. He came off as incredibly ranty, and needlessly verbose, in a sometimes distracting way. He used a lot of hyphens, ellipses, and strange punctuation. (ex: “the lime:::::light::::::”). After some time however I realized that this wasn’t how he writes all the time, but rather an attempt to fit his writing to the subject at hand. At first I thought this was somewhat obnoxious, but as I went on I grew more used to it. And besides getting used to it, there were flashes of genuine brilliance in there as well. I mean, some situations were described with such accuracy, insight, and understanding that I was really blown away. These particular portions of the book were, I’m sure, heavily influenced by interviewing primary sources, but regardless Wolfe penned it well.

I was appreciative of the fact that throughout the book Wolfe didn’t focus solely on the positive and made it clear that there were conflicting interests among even the Pranksters. When in situations like this not everything is happy happy joy joy let’s eat acid and mellow out. Interests don’t ALWAYS run in the same direction, and when you have someone like Kesey (who is basically a lodestone of the psychedelic variety) running the show there are bound to be rifts and doubts between people. This is a natural thing and I’m glad Wolfe addressed it.

I think the best thing to say about this book is that it made me think. Long and hard, sometimes. I found myself reading passages from it and then gazing into the distance in some deep contemplation about anything and everything. The book would spark a thought in me that would turn into a full fledged reflection, maybe even far beyond the points that the book brought up in the first place. Good writing does that I suppose.

I will say that I didn’t like the way the book ended. It was somewhat anti-climactic in that it sort of just fizzled and went out. Though, I guess you could say the same thing of the Merry Pranksters. There is allegory in that, like so much else in that long, strange trip to go Furthur. COSMO!

As I approach 80 years of age, I have always wondered about those days and how it came about. This book really sets it all in perspective.
An interesting part of world history

i agree with most of the positive reviews here…i’ll just add a few notes…

for whatever reason, i had always thought this book was fiction (and i don’t read much fiction) – but it isn’t – the author (Wolfe) adds his own unique stylistic flourish, but otherwise it’s a (mostly) ‘straight’-up story..

it’s not about the summer-of-love hippie era, but rather what could be considered the immediate ‘prequel’ to those times…in the movie ‘Magic Trip’, made from the film Kesey & the Pranksters took on their x-country bus expedition, you get to see the Pranksters, and they look far more preppy/beat than they do hippie, but you also see signs of what was (soon) to come in their wake…

Deadheads may be more than a little shaken to realize how close Tom Wolfe was to the Dead, and yet how amazingly little of them appears in this book – i don’t think Wolfe was all that into music, at least not ‘Dead’ music…

Another pretty-much-non appearance is a little group known as the Beatles, who were very much exploding on the music scene just as many of the events of this book were taking place. There’s a chapter where the Pranksters actually go to a Beatles show, but they were apparently mostly unimpressed…Beatlemania not their thing…

One major puzzle (for me) is that this book wasn’t written by Ken Kesey – the centerpiece (& financier) of the book’s events and himself a true-blue published author. That’s not a knock on Wolfe, just a bit of weird…how is it possible that Kesey didn’t write this book?

a fun read all the same…

Somebody wrote after a 1-star review “well I was there”. So was I. As a young Englishman, having just finished University I decided to spend my “last summer of freedom” (before taking up my first 9-5 job) exploring that great mysterious, amazing country called America. It was 1966 and I inevitably ended up on the West Coast and took the wonder drug, with some lovely friends who’d showed up from North Carolina.

Does Wolfe accurately chronicle that zeitgiest, that era? Not really. He writes interminable pages of detail about the goings on in and around the cult of the Merry Pranksters, for whom Ken Kesey was the leader.
Now I have a considerable respect for Kesey as, along with Timothy Leary, he was a leading figure in the LSD revolution, but Wolfe’s work I found first of all extremely parochial – he describes one small corner of the acid scene at that time, and not a typical one – in way that is repetitive and BORING. Afler ploughing through a few chapters of this, I gave up looking for substance, and started skimming the rest of the book to see if things changed. It appeared they didn’t so, having paid about ten quid for this “famous classic” I decided that my time is too precious to wade through pages of tedious detail, and tossed it in the recycle bin.

If you want a read about that era that is well written, doesn’t SMOTHER you with detail, and makes you LAUGH as well, you should read the classic” Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas” by Hunter S. Thmpson, who was also “there”, but unlike Wolfe speaks from INSIDE the drug experience, and to an excess which none of us “chemical pioneers” would have dared to venture into.

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