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The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test
 
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The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test (Paperback)

by Tom Wolfe (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
Price: £6.97 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Product details

  • Paperback: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Black Swan; New edition edition (17 Feb 1989)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0552993662
  • ISBN-13: 978-0552993661
  • Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 12.6 x 2.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 5,118 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #1 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > W > Wolfe, Tom
    #2 in  Books > Biography > Historical > United States > Military
    #6 in  Books > Biography > Political > United States

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

They say if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. But, fortunately, Tom Wolfe was there, notebook in hand, politely declining LSD while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters fomented revolution, turning America on to a dangerously playful way of thinking as their Day-Glo conveyance, Further, made the most influential bus ride since Rosa Parks's. By taking On the Road's hero Neal Cassady as his driver on the cross-country revival tour and drawing on his own training as a magician, Kesey made Further into a bully pulpit, and linked the beat epoch with hippiedom. Paul McCartney's Many Years from Now cites Kesey as a key influence on his trippy Magical Mystery Tour film. Kesey temporarily renounced his literary magic for the cause of "tootling the multitudes"--making a spectacle of himself--and Prankster Robert Stone had to flee Kesey's wild party to get his life's work done. But in those years, Kesey's life was his work, and Wolfe infinitely multiplied the multitudes who got tootled by writing this major literary-journalistic monument to a resonant pop-culture moment.

Kesey's theatrical metamorphosis from the distinguished author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to the abominable shaman of the "Acid Test" soirees that launched The Grateful Dead required Wolfe's Day-Glo prose account to endure (though Kesey's own musings in Demon Box are no slouch either). Even now, Wolfe's book gives what Wolfe clearly got from Kesey: a contact high. --Tim Appelo, Amazon.com



From the Back Cover

'I looked around and people's faces were distorted...lights were flashing everywhere...the screen at the end of the room had three or four different films on it at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been...the band was playing but I couldn't hear the music...people were dancing...someone came up to me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the back of my eye-lids...I sought out a person I trusted and he laughed and told me that the Kool-Aid had been spiked and that I was beginning my first LSD experience...'

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Customer Reviews

11 Reviews
5 star:
 (9)
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 (1)
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (11 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars I Second The RIP to Ken, 30 Nov 2002
By Bruce Kendall "BEK" (Southern Pines, NC) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
I've savored just about every word this man's ever written. I still vividly recall him at a lecture he gave in Berkley in 1972 standing at the lectern in his white Gatsby suit, starched pink shirt and nattily knotted tie. I can't recall the ostensible topic. He covered so much ground and had such a wealth of ideas and insights that the topic was irrelevent anyway. He's always been our keenest observer of American culture, on subjects ranging from hippies, art snobs, wall street, the space race, to the Southern nouveau-riches.
In terms of unadulterated reading enjoyment, however, this book is still my favorite. He captures the era perfectly. This was the period in the mid-sixties when the hippie philosophy and lifestyle was still genuine, before it had become commercially exploited by the mass media, before Manson and Altamont and the seeds of evil. It was an uncorrupted, pure, joyous movement and moment. Owsley was the bay area chemist who produced hits of Sandoz-quality acid that sent the children out dancing blissfully through the night and into the purple dawn. It truly looked like a brave new world. If you are young and can't undertand why former hippies wax nostalgic about it, it's primarily (at least to me) because that tiny era of innocence can never be recreated.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Far Out Man!, 23 May 2003
As somebody slightly obsessed with the major happenings of the sixties, but who missed the period by a good 10 years, I found this book compelling. I've heard stories for years by old hippies about their crazy travels, but nothing as lucid as Wolfe's excellent commentary on the Merry Pranksters. Kesey is painted as a zarathustra-esque messiah of hippiedom, leading his dedicated crew of followers into an awesome social experiment.....and not with small thanks to a little LSD! Slightly crazy, slightly dark at times, frequently funny, constantly fascinating. Wolfe seems to capture the idealistic notions of the pranksters' attempts to subvert society perfectly; as a reader you're literally bumping around the back of the bus with them. Oh for a big psychedelic school-bus!
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars RIP Ken Kesey... thanks for a beautiful life, 10 Nov 2001
By A Customer
This book is one of those rare works that expands your sense of the possible. I read it at 18 and I've read it several times since- and I don't know of a literary trip out there that takes you through the ecstasy and horror of the '60s with more sparkle, vividly immersive prose and such an honestly deranged perspective.

Ken Kesey, the central figure in this book, died today. He'll be missed.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Groovy baby
Very readable factual account of the start of the revolution in personal freedom.Read this and become an expert in 60's youth culture. Read more
Published 2 months ago by nicholas hargreaves

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent account of psychedelic outlaw underculture in the '60s
Ken Keysey is a myth in his own time. The author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest, the guru of LSD culture as the more gritty and real reflection of Timothy Leary (or I should... Read more
Published on 18 Oct 2007 by Talc Demon

5.0 out of 5 stars Not only a great read but also a great reference work of the era
Where did the saying "You're either on the bus or you're off the bus" come from ?

Who were the real people in Kerouac's On The Road ? Read more
Published on 13 Aug 2007 by Greysuit

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent account of psychedelic outlaw underculture in the '60s
Ken Keysey is a myth in his own time. The author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest, the guru of LSD culture as the more gritty and real reflection of Timothy Leary (or I should... Read more
Published on 19 Feb 2007 by Talc Demon

4.0 out of 5 stars The true identity of the sixties
The True Identity Of The Sixties
By:Brittany Wankowski

Reading Tom Wolfe’s “The electric Kool-aid acid test” is a true experience. Read more

Published on 7 May 2003 by brittany Wankowski

5.0 out of 5 stars A must
Tom Wolfe's fly-on-the-wall constant moving, Merry Prankster voyage; changed my life. No book documents, what was, an amazing important time in history - when the likes of you... Read more
Published on 10 Aug 2000 by pilki

1.0 out of 5 stars Actually, this book is not very good.
This book is staggeringly over rated. Awful sub Kerouacian prose describing a group of fiighntening ego maniacs and activities which pale in comparison even with those of grubby... Read more
Published on 5 Feb 2000

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply the most exciting and intense book i ever read
Tom Wolfe pulls you into a time in the sixties gets you "on the bus" takes you for the biggest trip and pulls you back out the other end into reality. Read more
Published on 24 Sep 1999 by S. Flamberg

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