synopsis:

this book is about Ken Kesey and his merry band of pranksters as they travel across the United States, and parts of Mexico, spreading self-awareness, as well as a good deal of hallucinogenic drugs. For a start, Kesey's own life with the Merry Pranksters is perhaps the consummate example of a phenomenon that, in 1968, baffled the national imagination: the transformation of the "promising middle-class youth with all the advantages" into what was popularly known as "the hippie." Kesey was more than promising. He was a Golden Boy of the West - a scholar, actor, star athlete, and one of the outstanding novelists of his generation - when he burst forth as an experimenter with powerful new hallucinogenic drugs, leader of the Merry Pranksters, and, finally, fugitive from the FBI, the California police, and the Mexican Federales.

on this book:

Tom Wolfe, a journalist already widely known for his exuberant portraiture of the American Bizarre, plunged into the psychedelic world of the Pranksters and emerged with 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test', a now-classic portrait of the coterie which gave the hippie world of the 1960s much of its philosophy and vocabulary. He recounts their romp across America in the first psychedelic bus, their alliance with the Hell's Angels, their Be-elzebubbling takeover of a Unitarian Church convention, their conversion of the biggest anti-Vietnam rally of all time into a freak-out, their zany games of hide-and-seek from the law in two countries.