[[Peace, Love, CK]]

I. Picking the Work

 Mr. Kreinbring and my friend Olivia first introduced me to this book. We were discussing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in AP English one day, and Mr. K happened to mention The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. My attention was caught right away. I actually looked up the Merry Pranksters and Ken Kesey and found some pretty interesting information.  this is a picture of the bus which Ken Kesey and the Pranksters traveled across America on. As you can see, they stood on top of the bus while driving down the roads, singing and yelling into microphones, tripping their asses off.

http://www.coolnurse.com/lsd.htm (a short history of LSD)

http://www.last.fm/music/Grateful+Dead (listen to the Grateful Dead.. free! members of this popular 1960’s band were a part of Kesey and the Prankster’s many Acid Tests throughout the story)

II. Reading the Work

 This book was not a very easy read, however, it was not necessarily difficult. Wolfe writes using chopped and screwed prose, run-on sentences, and confusing diction and syntax. It takes a little time to get used to, and it seemed as though he jumped around from event to event; it was hard to keep track of what was happening. However, as confusing as it was, it did enable me to feel as if I was tripping along with the Pranksters. At first I was frustrated with how Wolfe wrote the book because some parts are really just that confusing, but now I am glad he wrote like that because it made my experience reading the book more beneficial for myself and more interesting.

http://www.tomwolfe.com/KoolAidExcerpt.html (excerpt from the book so you can see the style of writing Wolfe used)

 III. Research and Writing

The research for this book was not that bad, actually. There was a lot of information about it, since it was an actual event that happened. There are tons of information out there about the 1960’s and when you have an outrageous event such as the Pranksters touring across America all doped up, it tends to get a lot of attention. I was very frustrated while writing the annotations because most of the passages and messages which Wolfe was trying to convey were all similar and it was difficult to explain different themes in each passage. This book allowed my creative side to come out, so I actually enjoyed most of the project overall. I should have spent a little more time on certain aspects of the whole thing, but overall, I felt as if it was pretty successful. One major let-down was my in capability to find an online version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in order to use as a background source. Also, it was very frustrating and annoying to look for critical articles because there were not many on this particular book.