The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

By Tom Wolfe,

Book cover of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

4 authors picked The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I love this book because it sweeps me into the wild, wonderful, free spirit of the 1960s.

Although it is ostensibly nonfiction, Wolfe uses a singular hip, frantic voice to propel readers into the weird world of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they cavort with the Grateful Dead at the infamous, hedonic LSD-laced Acid Tests, journey around the country in the psychedelically-painted bus nicknamed Further, and eventually head for Mexico to avoid arrest.

I've read this book multiple times, and on each occasion, it's like time-traveling to one of my favorite eras.

Okay, I might be stretching the definition of “cult” with this one, but hear me out.

This book—which is technically non-fiction, but reads an awful lot like a novel—tells the true story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ efforts to dose America with LSD-laced Kool-Aid in the 1960s. But it’s Kesey’s ramblings about creating a new religion and the devotion of the unhinged misfits who orbit around him that make me see the Merry Pranksters as cult-like.

Reading this book, I get the feeling that if Kesey hadn’t been stopped by the FBI, he very well might have changed…

From Buffy's list on living that 60s cult/commune life.

I read Acid Test as a child and it showed me and told me about everything I wanted or thought I wanted—and some of it I actually did. The book took me from a Junior High School dream of being cool and dropped me off at Punk’s front door nearly a decade later.

From Richard's list on music, mayhem, drugs, and sex.

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Tap Dancing on Everest By Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

This classic of New Journalism (applying the techniques of experimental fiction to reporting) is a chronicle of the long, strange trip across America taken by the so-called Merry Pranksters in the days before LSD was criminalised. Their transport – the original ‘magic bus’ – was loaded with lights, cameras, and sound equipment. Their house-band was the Grateful Dead. Their fate was a deflating come-down.

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