The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

By: Tom Wolfe

Narrated by: Luke Daniels

Tom Wolfe - one of the 20th century’s foremost voices in cultural criticism - went from local news reporter to international icon in 1968, with the publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Now voiced with vivacity and vigor by Audible Hall of Fame narrator Luke Daniels, the non-fiction swan-dive delves into the world of hippies, hedonism, and everything in between.

To most, Ken Kesey is best known as the author of the celebrated novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But for Tom Wolfe, Ken was the leader of the Merry Pranksters, a band of counter-culture bohemians who traveled cross-country in a far-out, brightly painted school bus they dubbed Furthur. The Pranksters were known for drug-fueled escapades, none more famous than the so-called “Acid Test”, wherein a party full of people would take LSD in an effort to escape the banality of reality and connect on a higher, subconscious plane. As Wolfe follows the group down their nonconformist rabbit hole, he’s led on a wild trip through the backwaters of the 1960s, encountering the era’s living legends - from The Grateful Dead to Allen Ginsberg - along the way.

©1968 Tom Wolfe (P)2019 Audible, Inc.

Extremely well-narrated

This is maybe the most effective audiobook I’ve yet experienced. As a text, the book is such a flurry of description, mood and energy that it can get exhausting. Here, the narrator embraces Wolfe’s manic prose in a way that carried me along and made me love the language. The book is wild, vivid and unruly, and this production helped make it feel like a lived experience.

Have been waiting & waiting for this book

Too bad it took Toms death to bring back so many of his works to the open catalog. The interpretation took some getting used to but generally worked

Blow your gourds

10/10 HIGHLY recommend. Read before you drop. Then Read After. Must’ve been a blast collecting the stories.

Great Reading

I loved Luke Daniels reading of this story. He really brought it to life and in a way vastly superior to what my own reading of the text would be. The story itself is an interesting story of a failed experiment in changing the world. If I could, I would certainly want to be on-the-bus and in-the-movie of the Pranksters.

trippity trip man

When I first read this novel in the 70s my dull as ditchwater internal interpreter could not make heads or tails of the narrative, and I was suitably not impressed. Such a different experience listening to Luke Daniels' inspired performance, so enjoyable. And there's a history lesson in there too, if you listen hard enough. Glad I listened.

Way-back machine to to the Acid Generation

Tom Wolfe's prose is nonparallel. This is a book that is better as an audible rendition than in print. The performance is awesome. You see the story through Ken Kesey's eyes. It takes you to the time and place so you can relive the events. No, I'm not on an acid trip as I write this; it's just that good. An immersive experience.

Great narration

Contrary to the opinion of others I thought the dramatic narration style was fitting to the absolutely nuts story.

A different world, a different time

This is a hard book to review. The world it describes is so foreign, but that's a good part of the point. These people thought that maybe they were creating a new world order. They were not but it's interesting that they thought they might be able to and that they believed it was worth a try.
This book is a difficult to read outloud and the reader does an excellent job of conveying what the book and the people in the book are about.
Sometimes a Great Notion is one of the greatest books ever written and it's interesting to get a bit of a sense of who Ken Kesey was through this book. I'm glad to have read it.
CT

Outstanding Performance!!

The book that brings the psychedelic hippy age into day-glo clarity. While the book is a classic and captures the essence of the Kesey acid tests, what makes it is the reading by Luke Daniels. His reading makes you FEEL the book. You are tripping as he reads it. Excellent!

Good, but dated

Great writing, but it now seems a little dated. I got tired of the same aimless antics of these acid heads.