The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the essential book…the pushing, ballooning heart of the matter * New York Times *A life-changer, a rabble-rouser, a mind-blower, a gathering of the tribes, a call to arms, a manifesto for a new society, a car repair manual, a fly-on-the-paisley-patterned-wall account of a cultural revolution – a masterpiece! – Jarvis CockerElectrifying * San Francisco Chronicle *An amazing book… A book that definitely gives Wolfe the edge on the nonfiction novel * The Village Voice *Every word seems placed with a care and a skill of contrivance… A major journalistic contribution to the future analysis of our own and America’s strange period of this century * Guardian *You only had to look at him… or read such books as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff to know that Tom Wolfe was like no other – John Pye * The Scotsman *Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence – Mick Brown * Daily Telegraph *Effortlessly, elegantly, Tom Wolfe bestrode both fiction and non-fiction… a style at once objective, subjective, and hallucinatory – Andy Martin * Independent *[Tom Wolfe’s] gleeful use of punctuation and italics, along with entertaining asides and neologisms that often quickly cemented themselves into the English lexicon, helped Wolfe stand out from other journalists * Guardian *[Wolfe] made literature fun and bores don’t like fun – Freddy Gray * The Catholic Herald *

Tom Wolfe (1931-2018) was the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood. He received the National Book Foundation’s 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.