The style of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is not the least bit out of the ordinary for writers of the beat movement, but Wolfe may have captured the pulse of the art better than any of his contemporaries by selecting a perfectly evocative subject matter in the guise of a straight edge reporter following one of North America’s most profound cultural awakenings, or, in layman’s terms, he wrote one heck of a great book—widely acclaimed because of the way it conveys facts on the ground as well as vibes in the air. However, whether you are the aforementioned layman, a psychedelic drug aficionado, or a historian of 1960’s counterculture, be wary of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, because you may come to hate it. The warning above is in no way meant to state that the book lacks merit. Instead, the shot across the bow is merely intended to point out that Read more…

The story told in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a book concerning an experiment to introduce radical ideas about the use of recreational drugs, is generally well-known. It concerns, first and foremost, the now iconic day-glow school bus loaded down for a trip across the continental USA; a trip during which bus pilots Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters became a cultural tour de force as they played new music, produced new movies, and took all manner of new drugs on their travels from California to New York and back again. It is a story that has been woven into the fabric of 1960s culture, and it is a story that has informed subsequent generations, influencing social movements in the 70s, 80s, 90s, aughts, and twenty-teens.  But as much as the story has saturated modern American thought and as much as the bus has become an icon of its age, the characters who Read more…