The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, (Paperback)

from dbsovereign

A long bus ride into psychedelia, chronicling Ken Kesey's (and his band of fellow "merry" tripsters) tour cross country and into Mexico. Wolfe helps us tour the various "trips" that people take and provides us with insight into the psychedelic experience. This book was a journalistic breakthrough...

from Miro

This is a great book by Tom Wolfe first published in 1967. It tracks the story of Ken Kesey following the eye of the storm so to speak as it leaves the Beat Generation, stops by the Perry Lane bohemians and then crashes onto California at full force with the hippies, LSD and psychedelia. Kesey w...

from xiaomarlo

It's a fascinating read, up until Kesey goes to Mexico and it begins to drag. The getting-high descriptions are really good, and there are lots of recognizable people from that period, like Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg, and Hunter S. Thompson.

from DinadansFriend

This is a group portrait of the Bay Area acid scene in the period 1962 to 1966. it was Wolfe's follow-up to his breakout book "The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby". This work deals far more with America's differing cultures that the relatively simple precursor, which was about exces...

from copyedit52

The drug-taking (psychedelic) hippies of the sixties, West Coast branch, are featured in this book. In particular, Ken Kesey, with whom Wolfe is clearly taken--perhaps too much so, since Wolfe's language implies a journalistic detachment, and I sense he lost his head a bit here, over Kesey, who w...