Rating:  -
This book will provide you with a lot of knowledge about pop culture and the hippie movement origin, evolution and expansion worldwide. It must be an obligatory purchase if you are interested in psychedelia.
Rating:  -
Does the caption paint a strong enough picture? It's five-thirty in the morning and i just finished the last page of one incredibly condescending, disingenuous look at 60's drug culture by an admitted conservative hanger-on with no tangible ties or affiliations to the scene whatsoever. This book did NOT define a generation, and frankly, fellow reviewers, its time to stop parroting phrases from the dust jackets and start developing actual opinions for yourself. I'm hardly a literary buff myself but it doesn't take a genius to realize that a certain degree of commercial success or select critical praise does not validate a book's quality.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is basically an account of acclaimed author Ken Kesey's life circa 65-66, but unfortunately we never once get to know Kesey, or any of the other Merry Pranksters as any more than exaggerated stock stereotypes with no discernible personalities, character traits or range of emotion. We're supposed to believe Kesey bore an illegitimate child with the twenty-something "Mountain Girl" while fleeing from the police and no-one, certainly not his apparent mute-doormat of a wife, so much as bat an eyelash? No, Wolfe's angle was simply to capitalize on the media frenzy and fascination of the drug culture and subject us to page after page of god-awful faux-drug-induced, mock-Kerouc/Burroughs/Leary-imitation free form prose, simultaneously conforming to the same aesthetic he apparently had so much disdain for.
If you need further convincing, may i direct you to the following quotes taken from Time Magazine's 10 questions for Tom Wolfe:
Has the drug culture been stripped of its intellect? Max Stendahl, IPSWICH, MASS.
Ha! That's assuming that it had an intellect. It inevitably leads to total lack of intellect--particularly in the case of LSD, which everyone assumed opened the doors of perception. We've since discovered that it does the opposite.
Did you ever use LSD or marijuana? John Foster JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA
No, I never did. LSD is too strong to take. I write about it in the book. They take it once, and for years afterward, they have these flashbacks. Just driving over a bump in the road on a motorcycle can do it. (??) I tried marijuana once.
The culture was admittedly flawed, yes, but still possessed a strong vitality, a spirited iconoclasm and sense of personal freedom and desire for self-discovery worth of much more merit than this book has to offer.
Rating:  -
My journalist heroes are usually the lefties who expose the horrible outcomes of greed. You know the type: Upton Sinclair, Michael Moore, and Amy Goodman. They pop the tinsel-draped myths of corporations and nations, and reveal the horrible outcomes of excessive power. It was hard, then, to read a conservative journalist's skewering of my own 1960s countercultural heroes. Ken Kesey and his band of experimental hippies get fully cynical treatment at the skilled hands of Wolfe. In Wolfe's hands the hippies are daft and naïve, out of touch with the world they want to save, and out of touch with themselves.
It's an extreme portrait of an exaggerated and unusual bunch of hippies, but an effective one nonetheless. You might even see in this book some of the reasons why the far fringes of the movement failed to win over a larger audience, and also why the Nixon/Reagan/Bush backlash had an easy target. Ah--but that is the problem with Wolfe's book: he's chosen a slow-moving and ripe piece of fruit. It's easy to lampoon the words of people who are high on marijuana or hallucinating on LSD. From the outside these little trips (as well as their greater voyage) might seem confused and pointless. But in the process of such dismissals, Wolfe misses what was indeed one of the most revolutionary and powerful movements to enter American culture.
The book remains funny and well-written. It's also a key historical document. But here's my question: it is really about the hippies? Or does it instead foreshadow the rise of the conservative culture war?
Rating: -
I think this is a great book. I am still currently reading it but I love it.
When your reading it you feel like you are right there experiencing every adventure they go on. Every one.
I wasn't alive or even thought of during this time but I now know what it would be like if I was. " Your either on the bus, or off the bus"
Rating:  -
The only possible explaination for this atrocious book is that Tom Wolfe himself was partaking of the mind altering chemicals.
As someone who himself has taken acid upwards of thirty times, and who has since realized what an utterly vacuous waste of space and time it is, I can say with authority that Tom Wolfe must have been under the influence when he wrote this atrocious book. It's just not enjoyable on ANY level. He rambles on for pages in what I assume is his attempt to convey the psychedelic experience to his readers and it just doesn't work. Perhaps if you have never taken these drugs you might find this kind of drivel persuasive but for me it was just silly.
Tom Wolfe really comes of age in Bonfire and Simmons.
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