Book discussion: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe, 1968)

"Cool Breeze is a kid with three or four days' beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a pickup truck. Bouncing along. Dipping and rising and rolling on these rotten springs like a boat. Out the back of the truck the city of San Francisco is bouncing down the hill, all those endless staggers of bay windows, slums with a view, bouncing and streaming down the hill. One after another, electric signs with neon martini glasses lit up on them, the San Francisco symbol of 'bar' - thousands of neon-magenta martini glasses bouncing and streaming down the hill, and beneath them hundreds, thousands of people wheeling around to look at this freaking crazed truck we're in, their white faces erupting from their lapels like marshmallows - streaming and bouncing down the hill - and God knows they've got plenty to look at."

Wolfe chronicles the 60s counterculture in this nonfiction work of "gonzo" journalism. He encounters Hell's Angels, the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsburg, Ken Kesey, and other prominent figures in a swirl of LSD-induced imagery and language.