Sunday, February 02, 2020

Book Excerpt for the Day


    Under the top-secret MK-ULTRA project, Dr. Hollister and many others across America administered LSD and other psychedelic drugs to paid volunteers who were observed and tested under hospital conditions.

    One of these volunteers was a young creative writing student at Stanford University named Ken Kesey (born 1935), who would soon find fame, fortune and literary acclaim as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Reasoning that lying on a hospital bed while being prodded and questioned by an endless stream of not all that quick-witted doctors and constantly having blood samples taken was perhaps not the most conducive environment for psychedelic experimentation, Kesey liberated (as we used to say) some Acid and other drugs when no one was looking.  Thereafter there followed years of Kesey’s more relaxed cosmic experimentation within his own home, in the company of his friends, and, more famously, on an old clapped-out 1939 International Harvester school bus.

    (from Boom! – A Baby Boomer Memoir 1947-2022 by Ted Polhemus)

  7*/10.  The complete review is here.
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