nomadjg 's review for:

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

4.0

---

Tom Wolfe did an excellent job telling the story of Kesey and the psychedelic movement with wonderful description and a seemingly penetrating understanding of its goals and unwritten rules. What was most striking to me is how this movement was quite separate and distinct from other social movement occurring at the same time. The acid heads were non-political and unconcerned about the racism and sexism of the time. Between 1962 and 1967 was obviously a time of huge cultural upheaval, but Wolfe shows how many different people were doing many different things. I see it as a fragmented time based on his portrayal. I do respect Kesey and his group because they were really trying to break through to something like enlightenment and transformation through the drug use. The cultural references to that time period were really fascinating and I will be looking a lot of them up. However, few people in the outer circle of the movement understood what he was trying to do, but at the same time so much of what they did with illegal drugs still seems very influential today especially in backpacker circles of which I have been on the periphery in my time overseas. The aspects of psychedelia that had to do with his quest for higher consciousness were all but lost and seem to have been replaced for the most part with an almost solipsistic self-gratification combined with the current climate of political correctness. I always thought that was what it had always been about, but he shows a very different picture, making this a knock out of a book