This book was a huge disappointment. It's hard to believe that a book that included so many interesting people, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsbergh and Neal Cassady just to name a few, could be so tedious and uninteresting. Wolfe's descriptions are clunky and monotonous. This is a guy who is about as square and straight as they come attempting to describe to his readers what it was like for Kesey and the merry pranksters to be high on acid and most of it reads like a hollow impersonation of Jack Kerouac. The poems at the beginning of some of the chapters are particularly nauseating. The book lacks substance as well. The further I got into it the more I began to feel that I was not getting the whole story but rather a romanticized version of what the hippie acid culture was really like. I'm not sure if Tom Wolfe set out to write an objective journalistic piece covering a time and a place in American history or to write an interesting and exciting non-fiction novel, but he failed on both ends.
First time around, this book positively made me want to try acid. Jury's still out on that one, folks.
These nut-jobs actually came to Houston with their bus and parked it two doors down from my best friend in Houston. Around 1969, moon, Led Zeppelin touring, people taking LSD and sitting on the hill in Hermann Park staring at the sun. My older brother and sister would drag me along to look at the "hippies" ... then the next day in the paper would be another story of a young Houston man who had become blind forever by roasting his retinas with pupils wide open looking at the sun. Guess I should have given him my shades.Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters" are the subject of this real-life look into the lifestyle of California hippies , commune living, and all those weird things you kids have heard of happening in the sixties. Well, The weekend they were in Houston, Ken Kesey (a benign Manson) went to the stadium where a day-long concert of the summer (Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service ... blah blah) was happening and again I was in tow by my older brother and sister, Kathy. This guy Kesey was there to entertain between sets, a true to life Haight-Asbury scene. At one point, he asked everyone to jump in synchronicity , I thought to feel the stadium rumble for a few seconds, but looking back he may have been trying to cause the thing to collapse! Hell, HE was on the field, as was the stage. I was gonna be the one to die, not him. Finally, he asked everyone to take a deep breath and let it out slowly as a loud hiss. Again take a breath and hiss. Again... again... over and over we were all seated and I was feeling light headed. Finally he says 'Take one more, deeper than any other, and as you breathe in, stand up and stretch as far as you can and as hard as you can. I remember I did this, and as I stood, I stretched and suddenly everything was going dark ... then wham! I hit the dirt, fainted. I had never fainted before. As I awoke, I noticed EVERYONE IN THIS 70+ THOUSAND SEAT STADIUM WAS ON THE GROUND ... having also fainted. He was indeed a prankster. Hippies.... if you want to know (why?) what it was REALLY like to be around hippies constantly ... read this.
Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I had a hard time with this book. It felt as though Tom Wolfe - despite attempts at objectivity - bought into Ken Kesey's pie in the sky optimism wholesale, missing the undercurrent of sadness and delusion in the Merry Prankster's daily lives. An interesting comparison can be found in the passage detailing the party Kesey throws for the Beatles (whom he doesn't actually invite) with the Hell's Angels. There is a strange cross-over here with Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels since both authors were at the party and writing their respective books. Wolfe, or rather Kesey via Wolfe, gives the impression that the Angels did their own thing and the Pranksters did their own thing and it was all great, despite the fact that Wolfe walked into the middle of a drunken gang bang (or maybe even gang rape). Thompson describes the same scene as sickening, not just the gang rape, but the pathetic attempts of the Pranksters to paint something that was clearly out of control as transcendent.
Charles Bukowski once called Tom Wolfe, "The worst American writer."
A kid's book that adults can enjoy because of brilliant layered story lines.
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