Acid Christ: Ken Kesey

From:

http://www.independent.com/news/2010/sep/21/books-drugs-and-charlie-chan/

September 21, 2010
By Colin Marshall

Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstasy

OPEN UP, READ ON, DROP OUT: Later at Chaucer's, another author will
stop by to discuss his own research into a very different but no less
controversial 20th-century figure. In Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD,
and the Politics of Ecstasy, journalist and novelist Mark Christensen
takes on the life and legacy of a man known partially as a man of
letters with novels like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to his name,
and partially­perhaps even primarily­known as the frontman of the
1960s and 1970s psychedelic drug movement. Associated with the likes
of the Hell's Angels and the Grateful Dead, surrounded by his Merry
Pranksters, and irreverently observed by the likes of Tom Wolfe,
Kesey's life and career would seem to be many biographers' dream subject.

Just as Huang does, Christensen weaves his personal history into his
research, creating a narrative that's at once tapped into the larger
culture and executed on a human scale. It was Wolfe's experimental
journalism on the Merry Pranksters' exploits that got Christensen
into the consciousness-alteration game and, soon after, the author
lived out his own story with LSD that he now tells in parallel with
Kesey's. The word on the street is that Christensen even once
arm-wrestled with Kesey, and any man who can make that claim surely
has more stories to tell. He'll be at Chaucer's to tell a few of them
on Tuesday, September 28, at 7 p.m.

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