Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Top 10 psychedelic non-fiction books

John Higgs is the author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, published in America by Barricade Books; it is the first full biography of the pioneer of psychedelic drugs.

Winona Ryder, Leary's goddaughter, wrote the introduction.

In 2006 Higgs came up with a top ten list of psychedelic non-fiction books for the Guardian. (Of course, the list has 11 titles.)

One title on the list:
The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

This is Wolfe's account of life with Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the birth of the American west coast psychedelic movement. Wolfe knew that a detached, even-handed journalistic approach could never really explain what was happening, so he gave his book the same psychedelic viewpoint as his characters. The result is a wonderful piece of writing. For those of us who weren't born in the 60s, this is probably the closest we can get to experiencing it.
Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

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