The electric kool aid acid tes

            
             "He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man-.
            
             A quote from the first page of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a novel about the transition from the late 60's to the early 70's. Thompson's acclaimed novel was fiction, more of an opinion on the times and people. Tom Wolfe wanted a more realistic approach when he wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The vibrant colorful history of the times is beautifully portrayed in this book. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (further referred to as TEKAAT), is a now-classic portrait of the coterie which gave the "hippie- world of the 1960s much of its philosophy and vocabulary we look back upon now. .
             "Our Dreams are not that far away as long as we don't fall into yesterday- (Wolfe p127).
             The spirit of the hippie/beatnik era is in the passage that Kenny Kesey explains to his fellow "Merry Pranksters- during a trip in their called " first psychedelic bus- Volkswagen Van. TEKAAT is a true story of author Tom Wolfe's account of his experiences with the hippies in the 60's. 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 a new view on life and living it to its full potential. The Main "character- of the account is Kenny Kesey. 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 (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Sometimes A Great Notion). But when Kesey burst forth as an experimenter with powerful new hallucinogenic drugs, and the leader of the Merry Pranksters, he began a new life of drug induced visions, attitudes, protests, and finally, fugitive from the FBI, the California police, and the Mexican Federales. 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" counter culture.