The first time I read this book, around about 1972 or '73, I found it to be an amazing chronicle of the 1960's 'hippie movement' that effectively tied together all of the cultural icons of that era, Haight-Ashbury, LSD, Grass, Ginsburg, Kerouac, Leary, The Grateful Dead, Hell's Angels and even a bit of the Beatles. What I remembered most was the amazing bus trip across the USA that Ken Kesey's day glow-colored Merry Pranksters took in 1964. So, naturally, I decided to read it again, this time in order to post a review on the web site.

Uh-huh, right. This book is about Sooooo much more than the bus trip. For one thing, after living so long in Kesey's home territory, it turns out that I now know many of the players in the book's story, and others who weren't at all familiar have take their place in the history of the life and times of the 1960's. Oh yeah, they're talking about Chuck's Health Food and Pool store.....

Of course, the book is also about the day-glow crazies and the bus, but it is also about that 'bus energy' that I mention in the F.Q.A. page. The pranksters easily got themselves onto some impossibly foolish and dangerous predicaments, but somehow always managed to always just skate around all of the holes in the ice, seemingly by magic.

A side benefit of reading this book is to gain an insight into Ken Kesey as an author, as much of his early background is covered, as are some of the inspirations for his best-selling books One Flew Over the Coocoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion.

Those of you with sensitive dispositions might want to consider that this book is written with wild abandon, neither the language, nor the story are refined. The author's writing style is over-the-top, even by today's standards.

Note: The following text and photos are Copyrighted Material. Please respect the author's rights.

Back in Kesey's log house in La Honda, all sitting around in the evening in the main room, and Page Browning : I think I'll close the window-and in that very moment another Prankster gets up and closes it for him and smi-i-i-iles and says nothing....The Unspoken Thing-and these things keep happening over and over. They take a trip up into the High Sierras and Cassady pulls the bus off the main road and starts driving up a little mountain road-see where she goes. The road is so old and deserted the pavement is half broken up and they keep climbing and twisting up into nowhere, but the air is nice and up at the top of the grade the bus starts bucking and gulping and won't pull any more. It just stops. It turns out they're out of gas, which is a nice situation because its night fall and they're stranded totally hell west of nowhere with not a gas station within, maybe fifty miles. Nothing to do but stroke themselves out on the bus and go to sleep....

DAWN

All wake to a considerable fetching and hauling and grinding up the grade below and over the crest comes a

CHEVRON

gasoline tanker, a huge monster of a tanker. Which just stops like they all met somewhere before and gives them a tankfull of gas and without a word heads on into the Seirras toward absolutely

NOTHING

Babbs - Cosmic control, eh Hassler!

And Kesey - Where does it go? I don't think man has ever been there. We're under cosmic control and have been for a long, long time, and each time it builds, it's bigger, and it's stronger. And then you find out...about Cosmo, and you discover that he's been running the show...

The Unspoken Thing.

Tom Wolfe's literary accomplishments include Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff

November 10th, 2001

Condolences to Faye, Chuck, Sue, Nora, Nancy, Kit, Zane, and all of the Kesey friends and clan upon the passing of the Master Merry Prankster today. Death is the unknown from which we all were born. If continuousness exists there, we'll meet again.

-Sharkey

"If you seek his monument, look around you."
-University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer,
speaking at Kesey's memorial service

The Original Further, now rests on Kesey's
property in Pleasant Hill, Oregon.
Image courtesy of Key-Z Productions

A bit more on Ken Kesey and his passing is available in the form of archived newspaper articles originally published in Eugene's Register Guard. Follow these links to open a new browser window displaying the stories:

November 11th 2001 article, including links to related story outlining Kesey's "timeline"

November 15th 2001 article, observing Kesey's memorial service

November 15th 2003 article, unveiling of Kesey statue in Eugene