The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe

"Are you on the bus or off the bus?" That question was asked millions of times by the boomers who participated in the hippy, flower child, anti–war, and drug cultures of the late 60's and early 70's. This question was lifted from this book which told the story of Ken Kesey and his merry band of pranksters who bought an old International Harvester school bus, painted it up in psychedelic colors, added audio and video which was state of art for its day and age, and smoked dope, dropped acid, and "tootled" straight America as they drove this bus across the country from the West Coast to the East Coast.

This book became the must read Bible for a whole generation of aspiring or wanna be hippies. If you have never read it, you should, because it is an incredible portrait of a unique era. If you have read it, you should probably revisit it now to see how much you have changed and how much the world has changed from those halcyon days.

Ken Kesey was quite a remarkable man. He wrote a brilliant novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. (This is another book that is well worth reading). While at Stanford he volunteered as a guinea pig for some tests the Army wanted to run. It was there he "discovered" LSD. Neither he nor the world was ever the same. Kesey used the money he made from his novel to buy property that became the first West Coast hippy haven. This is the chronicle of when he and his tribe went "On the Road".

It is a great story about unique people and unique times, and Tom Wolfe does the best job imaginable in putting the story down on Paperback in a very readable and enjoyable format.

Review by Len Oppenheim