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rebelkat's review against another edition
Listen I made it a bit over halfway, I really did try.
I was excited going in: new journalism, Ken Kesey and his cult The Merry Pranksters, 60s counterculture, pages filled with cameos ranging from hunter s thompson to allen ginsburg. But it sucks. They’re all incoherent and sound like every other person sounds on acid. The entire book was nonsense, Kesey yelling he could “hear blue” and ::: vibrations :: or Kesey preaching woo-woo, life-path guidance and cryptic attempts at sacred wisdom; just a long and messy melange of cherry-picked and oversimplified concepts popularized by different branches of pseudosciences which he paired with (the grossly appropriated) facets of several eastern religions UGH
I was excited going in: new journalism, Ken Kesey and his cult The Merry Pranksters, 60s counterculture, pages filled with cameos ranging from hunter s thompson to allen ginsburg. But it sucks. They’re all incoherent and sound like every other person sounds on acid. The entire book was nonsense, Kesey yelling he could “hear blue” and ::: vibrations :: or Kesey preaching woo-woo, life-path guidance and cryptic attempts at sacred wisdom; just a long and messy melange of cherry-picked and oversimplified concepts popularized by different branches of pseudosciences which he paired with (the grossly appropriated) facets of several eastern religions UGH
heatherlou81's review against another edition
3.0
A little too self-consciously groovy, man. I got a little tired of his literary pandering to the psychedelic generation. I never finished it though so maybe I missed something.
hakkakzadeh's review against another edition
Long and boring, the point was not obvious
aaaleksic's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
inspiring
lighthearted
medium-paced
3.25
Honestly don’t remember where I got this one. It was definitely on my list of books to read after I finished Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, so I think I might’ve gotten it as a Christmas gift from either a friend or family member who knew I wanted to read it next. I didn’t read it right away after reading The Doors of Perception. Honestly, I had completely forgotten about it until now, but I figured why the hell not? I’ve already been reading a bunch of academic books written in the 70s, might as well read up on the LSD movement too.
Similar to The Doors of Perception, this book isn’t written as a singular narrative. There’s accounts from other Pranksters and people who participated in the Acid Tests, poems, and different POVs strewn throughout. It makes for a fun read and I actually found this one to be a bit more coherent and easier to follow than The Doors of Perception. The author does a good job reflecting the emotions and realities lived by the people who participated in the Merry Pranksters or who underwent the Acid Tests, so it’s more than just an account from an ‘objective’ and outsider point of view. The reader is really sucked into the mindset of the Pranksters and how they perceived the world. Honestly there's not much I can say in criticism of it. It does have a very subjective tilt to the narrative and that’s by design, so it’s hard to tell how impactful the Merry Pranksters really were to the scene and how much was exaggerated. Ultimately, though, I feel like a lot would’ve been lost if the author didn’t include that more subjective experience into the narrative. The reader really gets a sense of the psychology of the Merry Pranksters through this book and it’s super interesting to parse through.
Overall I would say it’s a good read. Extremely fun and pretty easy to follow. I wouldn’t say it’s mind blowing to any degree, it’s the kind of stuff you expect people high on psychedelics would say. We gotta live in the now man, times not real dude, I just now discovered we’re all one with the universe- the regular gist. That’s another thing I would say was missing from this narrative, an overall sense of meaning that didn’t just sound exactly like you’d expect a bunch of young people with money on drugs to sound like. Honestly though, I can’t even say that diminished the worth of the narrative in my eyes, it was still fun to follow the hijinks of the Merry Pranksters.