Product 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 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...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8385 in Books
• Published on: 1989-02-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

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...'

About the Author
Tom Wolfe grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and graduated from Washington and Lee University. He received his doctorate in American Studies from Yale University. Mr Wolfe worked as a reporter for the Springfield Union (Massachusetts), The Washington Post, and the New York Herald Tribune. His writing has also appeared in New York magazine, Esquire, and Harper's. He is the author of several works of non-fiction: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Pump House Gang, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Text, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, The Painted Word, Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine, The Right Stuff, From Bauhaus to Our House and The Purple Decades, A Reader. His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in 1987. He lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

I Second The RIP to Ken
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.

Far Out Man!
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!

RIP Ken Kesey... thanks for a beautiful life
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.