Electric Kool Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ushered in an era of New Journalism. "An American classic" (Newsweek) that defined a generation. "An astonishing book" (The New York Times Book Review) and an unflinching portrait of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, LSD, and the 1960s.

A wild, psychedelic, utterly Wolfe-ian romp through the rise of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is Tom Wolfe’s seminal portrait of Ken Kesey, one of the most magnetic figures of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, and his band of Merry Pranksters. Along the way, even as he vividly recounts the group’s infamous Acid Tests and the country’s changing attitudes toward psychedelic drugs, Wolfe ropes in a who’s who of the early years of the hippie movement, from the Hells Angels to the Grateful Dead to Allen Ginsberg. Wolfe’s clear, unblinking depiction of the travels, experiments, and exploits of his subjects have made his book the quintessential text in the New Journalism that he was instrumental in creating. Readers will find an unparalleled examination of this pivotal moment in American history. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a prescient, evergreen classic, as groundbreaking now as it was when it first stormed onto the scene and forever changed what we thought nonfiction was capable of.

Amerika in den frühen Sechzigerjahren: LSD-Experimente, San Francisco, Blumenkinder. Und eine Busreise, wie es sie nie zuvor gegeben hat und nie mehr geben wird. 1968 beschrieb Tom Wolfe die Reise von Ken Kesey und seinen „Merry Pranksters“ in seinem legendären Klassiker. Ein Buch, welches längst als Neues Testament der Hipster-Mythologie gilt.

Two of the most famous pieces of non-fiction by Aldous Huxley (best known for Brave New World), The Doors of Perception details his experiences on the mind-altering drug mescaline, while Heaven and Hell details the relationships between mysticism, art, and sense perception that these experiences helped Huxley to explore and develop. He analogizes the mental states achievable through the use of mind-altering substances to very forms of religious self-flagellation, and also theorizes that they might be used as a form of treatment for psychological ailments. The two works have been significant influences on thinkers in this field, as well as writers, theologians, and philosophers. Random House of Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in ebook form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.

"When are the 1970s going to begin?" ran the joke during the Presidential campaign of 1976. With his own patented combination of serious journalism and dazzling comedy, Tom Wolfe met the question head-on in these rollicking essays in Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine -- and even provided the 1970s with its name: "The Me Decade."

Here, for the first time, is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America's most influential and incisive journalists--Hunter S. Thompson. In letters to a Who's Who of luminaries from Norman Mailer to Charles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe to Lyndon Johnson, William Styron to Joan Baez--not to mention his mother, the NRA, and a chain of newspaper editors--Thompson vividly catches the tenor of the times in 1960s America and channels it all through his own razor-sharp perspective. Passionate in their admiration, merciless in their scorn, and never anything less than fascinating, the dispatches of The Proud Highway offer an unprecedented and penetrating gaze into the evolution of the most outrageous raconteur/provocateur ever to assault a typewriter.

"An excellent book by a genius," said Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., of this now classic exploration of the 1960s from the founder of new journalism. "This is a book that will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other."--Newsweek In his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) Wolfe introduces us to the sixties, to extravagant new styles of life that had nothing to do with the "elite" culture of the past.

Tom Wolfe's The Purple Decades brings together the author's own selections from his list of critically acclaimed publications, including the complete text of Mau-Mauing and the Flak Catchers, his account of the wild games the poverty program encouraged minority groups to play.