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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1967) (edit title/settings)

by Tom Wolfe (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

Tom Wolfe's much-discussed kaleidoscopic non-fiction novel chronicles the tale of novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. In the 1960s, Kesey led a group of psychedelic sympathizers around the country in a painted bus, presiding over LSD-induced "acid tests" all along the way.... read more

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “You're either on the bus or off the bus.”
    Ken Kesey
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in. The inevitable bullshit hasn’t constipated his cerebral cortex yet. He still sees the world as it really is, while we sit here, left with only a dim historical version of it manufactured for us by words and official bullshit,
    Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers
  • And—of course!—the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren’t qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
  • Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there’s not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we’re going to wail with on this whole trip.”
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • One was Aldous Huxley, who had taken mescaline and written about it in The Doors of Perception.
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • Everything in everybody’s life is … significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings. And the vibrations. There is no end of vibrations.
    Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
  • In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man’s potential experience without his even knowing it. We’re shut off from our own world.
    Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
  • What they all saw in … a flash was the solution to the basic predicament of being human, the personal I, Me, trapped, mortal and helpless, in a vast impersonal It, the world around me. Suddenly! —All-in-one!—flowing together, I into It, and It into Me, and in that flow I perceive a power, so near and so clear, that the whole world is blind to.
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
  • And New York—what a dirge New York was. The town was full of solemn, spent, irritable people shit-kicking their way down the sidewalks. A shit kicker is a guy with a frown on and his eyes on the ground, sloughing forward with his shoes scuffing the pavement like he’s kicking horseshit out of the way saying oh that this should happen to me.
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
  • “We’re not on the Christ Trip. That’s been done, and it doesn’t work. You prove your point, and then you have 2,000 years of war. We know where that trip goes.”
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
  • Obviously, according to this principle, man does not have free will. There is no use in his indulging in a lifelong competition to change the structure of the little environment he seems to be trapped in. But one could see the larger pattern and move with it—Go with the flow!—and accept it and rise above one’s immediate environment and even alter it by accepting the larger pattern and grooving with it—Put your good where it will do the most!
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
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First Sentence edit see section history

THAT'S GOOD THINKING THERE, COOL BREEZE. COOL BREEZE is a kid with three or four days' beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a pickup truck.

Table of Contents edit see section history

I: Black Shiny FBI Shoes
II: The Bladder Totem
III: The Electric Suit
IV: What Do You Think Of My Buddah?
V: The Rusky-Dusky Neon Dust
VI: The Bus
VII: Unauthorized Acid
VIII: Tootling The Multitudes
IX: The Crypt Trip
X: Dream Wars
XI: The Unspoken Thing
XII: The Bust
XIII: The Hell's Angels
XIV: The Frozen Jug Band
XVII: Departures
XVIII:Cosmo's Tasmanian Deviltry
XIX: The Trips Festival
XX: The electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
XXI: The Fugitive
XXII: !Diablo!
XXIII: The Red Tide
XXIV: The Mexican Bust
XXV: Secret Agent Number One
XXVI: The Cops And Robbers Game
XXVII: The Graduation
Epilogue

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 397 of 1271 in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (authoritative list)

Preceded by Chocky, and followed by The Cubs and Other Stories.

This book is in TIME Magazine's All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books. (authoritative list)
This is book 91 of 102 in National Review - 100 Best Non-fiction Books of the Century. (authoritative list)

Preceded by Speak, Memory, and followed by Darwin's Black Box.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Tom Wolfe (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Country: United States
Publication Date: 1967
ISBN: 9780553380644
Page Count: 431

Classification edit see section history

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

   
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
  • Sometimes a Great Notion

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history

   
  • The Language Police

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