Where the Reading Takes You

Title: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Media: Book

YouThis past autumn I began a reading project I first heard on KUOW public radio. You start with one book. The second book you read will be inspired by some idea, theme, character, etc. in the first. Qualities in this second book inspire a third title, and so on until the project ends or you start again from a new book.

I just finished Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. A really amazing biography of MLK that explores only, but in great depth, King’s work as a public figure beginning in 1956 with the Montgomery Bus Boycott (inspired by Rosa Park) and ends with his death in 1968 when he had switched his mission to the larger hopes of economic justice and working to the end the Vietnam War. My most clear take away: King hardly slept over these 12 years fighting for justice and was often a reluctant leader bearing the cross of the title, despite moments of doubt he never wavered from his belief in the power of non-violence to bring about justice, this belief was powered by deep faith that he was doing work of a higher calling. I cannot imagine a better written biography of King’s work.

I will now start on Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The MLK book mostly explored the politics and social dimensions of race in the 1960s. I now want to look at the ‘6os through a cultural lens a la the psychedelic drug underground. Here is the run down of where the reading has taken me.1. American Movie Critics: this is an anthology of film criticism.2. The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshaw: I chose this book because Warshaw’s essays on Chaplin and on gangster films were two favorites in American Movie Critics.3. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller: Warshaw had a surprisingly negative essay of Death of a Salesman in The Immediate Experience.4. Rabbit, Run by John Updike. I chose this novel because Rabbit is a character like Biff Loman, a middle class man living in quiet desperation whose best days were in high school on a sports team.5. Rabbit, Redux by John Updike: I was taken with Rabbit and wanted to know what happened next.6. W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography of Race: I chose this biography of Du Bois because race relations played a major role in Rabbit, Redux set in the summer of 1969.7. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. – there is a direct line from Du Bois as leader of black America to King.
8. On to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – chosen to stick with the theme of the radical ‘60s culture.