Ken Kesey

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Ken Kesey  · 19 Jan 2012  · 349pp  · 113,575 words

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST ALSO BY KEN KESEY Sometimes a Great Notion Kesey’s Garage Sale Demon Box Caverns (with O. U. Levon) The Further Inquiry Sailor Song Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets

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Big Double the Bear The Sea Lion Last Go Round (with Ken Babbs) Kesey’s Jail Journal Ken Kesey ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION VIKING VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New

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in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright © Ken Kesey, 1962 Copyright renewed Ken Kesey, 1990 All rights reserved EISBN: 9781101575277 Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe  · 1 Jan 1968  · 224pp  · 91,918 words

, nothing more than psyche food for beautiful people, while giving some guy from New York a lift to the Warehouse to wait for the Chief, Ken Kesey, who is getting out of jail. ABOUT ALL I KNEW ABOUT KESEY AT THAT POINT WAS THAT HE was a highly regarded 31-year-old

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Dolbier said: "In the fiction wilderness, this is a towering redwood." Granville Hicks said: "In his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey demonstrated that he was a forceful, inventive and ambitious writer. All of these qualities are exhibited, in even higher degree, in Sometimes a Great Notion

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..." A bus? A Beatles record? The Pranksters are here, Now Trippers. Kesey had been invited to Esalen to conduct a seminar entitled "A Trip with Ken Kesey." Nobody had quite counted on the entire fully wired and wailing Prankster ensemble, however. The clientele at Esalen had come a long way in a

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friendly, but they glowed in the dark. They pranked about like maniacs in the serene Hot Springs. Precious few signed up for a trip with Ken Kesey, even in seminar form. Sandy, meanwhile, was swinging wildly from feelings of paranoia to feelings of godly . . . Power. And the trip was always the bus

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LSD experience, minus the LSD, using light effects and music, mainly. The big night, Saturday night, was going to be called The Acid Test, featuring Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Kesey and the Pranksters were primed for the Festival. Even Mountain Girl was on hand. She had wrestled the thing out

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Mountain Girl got stoned on grass and started composing the great suicide note: "Last words. A vote for Barry is a vote for fun. I, Ken Kesey, being of (ahem) sound mind and body, do hereby leave the whole scene to Faye, Corporation, cash and the works (and it occurs to me

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and a groove. So she sat down in Mazatlan and wrote her mother a Beautiful People letter ... And she found Zonk and, unexpectedly, the famous Ken Kesey and beautiful people. But one thing about the beautiful people themselves—Namely, the Merry Pranksters. She had heard of the fabulous Merry Pranksters even in

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of whom were so high they were used to all sorts of time and geography warps. Everything was real, Mani, Madame Blavatsky's Chohan maya, Ken Kesey broadcasting over the p.a. system ... Kesey finally comes out and walks through the residue, but they are all wacked out and he is hardly

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mean the cops—" "The very ones. It was a bad scene. Like there's a lot of cats up here who are not enchanted with Ken Kesey. They sent him this letter." Well, obviously they haven't, because there it is, up on the wall. But the thought is there ... Creaks on

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," says Jack, then resumes: "Like there's a lot of cats up here—" "It's a beautiful thing," says Frenchy. "—who are not enchanted with Ken Kesey and they sent him this letter." "Jack—" And Frenchy hunkers down on the floor and opens the cheese spread and pulls the knife out of

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three sugar cubes under it... the symbol of LSD, of course, like four X's XXXX, for whiskey,... and the voice-over saying "... and author Ken Kesey ..." Out in the clearing, beyond the jungle of light stands and wires and the rest of it, in a big pool of light, there's

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is kneading and slapping and flummoxing the bass like the creamy days of Siam Stewart. The New Dimensions—now that's very funny, you know. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters have to smile over that. Kesey and the Pranksters are off to one side of the Barn waiting for their turn

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were recorded on tapes or film or in writing. I was fortunate to get the help of many unusually talented and articulate people; most notably, Ken Kesey himself. The Pranksters recorded much of their own history in the Prankster Archives in the form of tapes, diaries, letters, photographs and the 40-hour

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

by Marc Weingarten  · 12 Dec 2006  · 363pp  · 123,076 words

1966, when he received a cache of letters from an anonymous sender. The letters, which were addressed to novelist Larry McMurtry, were written by author Ken Kesey, who had been busted for marijuana possession in April 1965 and again in January 1966 and had jumped bail to Mexico, where he was in

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could tell that Kesey had done his homework, New Journalism-style—but as it turned out, Kesey’s life story was every bit as intriguing. Ken Kesey was raised on a farm that his father owned in Springfeld, Oregon. Like Tom Wolfe Sr., Fred Kesey operated a collective, the Eugene Farmers Cooperative

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, which he turned into one of the biggest dairy operations in the state. A strapping athlete with literary aspirations, eighteen-year-old Ken Kesey enrolled in the University of Oregon in 1953 and earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism. In 1959 he received a creative writing fellowship from

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astonishing book,” wrote C. D. B. Bryan in the New York Times Book Review. “Wolfe is precisely the right author to chronicle the transformation of Ken Kesey from respected author of ‘And One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ [sic] to an LSD enthusiast…. Wolfe’s enthusiasm and literary fireworks make it

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,” Debbie says. “But now I’m more or less working in the vein of being an artist or a model or a cosmetologist. Or something.” Ken Kesey’s dream to “move beyond acid” never took hold in the Haight; drugs just became an end in themselves, permeating everything like toxic fallout. Didion

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he’d be on safer ground when he brought some of the Angels, including Barger and Terry the Tramp, to a Labor Day gathering at Ken Kesey’s La Honda compound. Despite Thompson’s reservations about bringing the Angels to La Honda (“I knew violent freaks when I saw them”), the Angels

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generation giving voice to itself. Emboldened, Wenner ventured out beyond Berkeley to La Honda, where he experienced his first acid trip under the auspices of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. In San Francisco, where an alternative culture rooted in rock and roll was simmering, Wenner attended concerts at places such as

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. In a cover story for Ramparts, he savagely decried the leaders of the movement, calling acid guru Timothy Leary “Aimee Semple McPherson in drag” and Ken Kesey a “hippie has-been.” That attitude made no sense to Wenner, but the final straw came when editor Sol Stern took a trowel to Wenner

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

by John Markoff  · 22 Mar 2022  · 573pp  · 142,376 words

. At various times he has dabbled in journalism, photography, activism, multimedia, social media, and business consulting. He has also been a provocateur. A member of Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters, he helped light the spark that led to the Summer of Love and the San Francisco music scene. Among the

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family members perceived as a giveaway. The immigrant West Coast Brands could have been the Stampers, the tough-as-nails Oregon logging family imagined in Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion. Stewart Brand’s oldest brother, Mike, spent three summers in the woods in the family logging business in the

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Road, just a short drive from Perry Lane—described by writer Ed McClanahan as “the lunatic fringe on Stanford’s stiff upper lip”[1]—where Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters first took root in the early sixties, and around the corner from where the Grateful Dead took up residence in an

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can do is non-fiction. What am I going to do?” The dilemma hung over him for years until, after leaving the army, he read Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey nailed it, Brand decided. (Kesey never logged but knew the world well—partly thanks to extensive research in the

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: he had found a calling. * * * When he arrived back in North Beach, a young poet who was staying in his apartment thrust a copy of Ken Kesey’s landmark first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, into his hands. Brand saw that many of the things he had found on

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serious frame of mind. It would be almost two years before his father died. Brand was close to three men, Jack Loeffler, Steve Durkee, and Ken Kesey, who each seemed like a potential model for how he might live his life. He thought of them as Lao-tzu, Buddha, and Nietzsche, respectively

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academic and military researchers who pursued its uses, from mind control and mind expansion to spirituality. It became illegal in California on October 6, 1966. Ken Kesey had fled to Mexico and attempted to fake his suicide, but on the weekend of September 30, his disembodied voice wafted from a campuswide audio

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the two bands jammed for a while. Brand had put the Pranksters on the bill, and they all wanted to be there, including an incognito Ken Kesey. On their way from Mexico, the Pranksters’ bus broke down repeatedly—the temperature in the desert went well above 100 degrees—and their pet parrot

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Brands had learned were emerging in the technology world south of San Francisco. Nixon and Brand represented polar opposites of the sixties counterculture. Brand, like Ken Kesey, identified with the “psychedelic side” of the antiwar movement while Nixon found inspiration in the Cuban and Chinese revolutions. Nixon wanted to take power while

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. It also gave him a front-row seat as a parade of interesting people would file in to visit Brand that summer, including Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, and Hugh Romney Jr. It was a great summer job. Kaphan would go on to become an early computer software hacker and would be hired

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their way into a tight community less than a mile from Perry Lane, the bohemian focal point of the Midpeninsula, where Brand had first met Ken Kesey. Members of the Grateful Dead had lived in a rambling mansion known as the Chateau about halfway between the two neighborhoods. Dick Raymond lived just

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sources, including Ramon Sender’s electronic music, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the movie A Fistful of Dollars, Malcolm X, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Franklin Roosevelt, Ken Kesey, the Grace Cathedral Choir, and Adolf Hitler, among others. Like America Needs Indians!, WAR:GOD received good reviews[10] and might have gone further, but

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Lois Jennings’s hand in the first chapter of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which described the couple driving to meet Ken Kesey, who was getting out of jail: “And, oh yeah, there’s a long-barreled Colt .45 revolver in her hand, only nobody on the street

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. At the end of February, he was invited to appear on a panel at SUNY Buffalo on “Drugs and the Arts” featuring Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey, as part of an ambitious “New Worlds” conference on psychedelic drugs. He took the train across the country, on the way reading Paul Ehrlich’s

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source his claim. “Half or more of computer science is heads.” The implication, of course, was that computing was the next thing after LSD—something Ken Kesey had realized several years earlier when Dave Evans introduced him to Engelbart’s NLS computing system. Style aside, the article caught virtually all of the

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considered friends, like Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner. Krassner had originally moved to the West Coast from New York when Brand had convinced him and Ken Kesey to edit the final Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. They in turn had persuaded the counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb to illustrate the cover

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drawn in. He confronted Brand, demanding to know if he had tampered with his poster. His roommate replied that, no, he hadn’t, but that Ken Kesey had been around for a while that afternoon.[7] On another occasion, Krassner decided to read the journal that Brand was keeping, and then found

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What’s Actually Happening. Among those he roped in were Buckminster Fuller, Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan, Jacques Cousteau, E. F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich, Gregory Bateson, Ken Kesey, Amory Lovins, and Herman Kahn. (Brand decided that the intelligent conservatives he had invited to meet with Brown—Kahn, Milton Friedman, and William F. Buckley

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label Whole Earth Discipline as a “manifesto,” and now, once again perhaps somewhat reluctantly, Brand had become an activist. In the sixties, he had shared Ken Kesey’s contempt for the antiwar movement, and afterward, he retained an antipathy for the New Left. His efforts at environmental activism in the sixties, Life

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away convinced that there was a Great American Novel to be written about the loggers. Several years later he was relieved when he realized that Ken Kesey had written Sometimes a Great Notion, detailing the world that Brand had discovered. On temporary assignment as an army photographer at the Pentagon, Lt. Brand

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another year for NASA to produce such a photo, and it would become a powerful symbol that united rather than divided humanity. Brand stands with Ken Kesey in front of Further, the Merry Prankster bus. Leaning out of the window in the driver’s seat is Neal Cassady, the legendary Beat figure

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. Although Brand was never an “on the bus” Prankster, he is photographed here riding the bus on its way to the Acid Test “graduation” that Ken Kesey organized to mark the end of the LSD era he had helped create. The events leading up to the “graduation” in October 1966 were described

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volleyball game that took place in the lot behind the store. In January 1971, the Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog was edited by Ken Kesey (far right) and Paul Krassner (left), the editor of The Realist. The issue, which was graced with a Last Supper homage by cartoonist R. Crumb

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

by Fred Turner  · 31 Aug 2006  · 339pp  · 57,031 words

with the Warm Springs Indians, Brand read a book that seemed to confirm his inkling that Indians might hold the key to a nonhierarchical world, Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There Kesey told the story of McMurphy, an individualistic con man imprisoned in a mental

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, he found a way to bring a countercultural version of that past to life. In 1963 Brand wrote a low-key letter introducing himself to Ken Kesey and soon after met him face-to-face. By that time, Kesey was not only an increasingly famous author, but the host of a burgeoning

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Supplement offered articles and letters from and about the communities Brand had visited. The first issue of the Supplement, for instance, included letters from Pranksters Ken Kesey and Ron Bevirt; Peter Rabbit of Drop City and, more recently, the Libre Commune; and Steve Durkee from the Lama Foundation, and an exchange between

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IN ONE PLACE VERY LONG.”37 Grafted onto the historical figure of the American cowboy, this new “Cowboy Nomad” is part Marshall McLuhan and part Ken Kesey. He roams, but he takes his electronic (and psychedelic) technology with him. He can’t bear the commercial American landscape or the middle class, and

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learning,” Brand later wrote. “Once that process has its stride, don’t tinker with it, let it work for you.”46 As he had seen Ken Kesey do with the Merry Pranksters, Brand downplayed his own power within the system. Apart from the “Purpose” section at the start of each Catalog, his

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attack had been transformed into symbols of a holistic way of life. Buckminster Fuller had built one for his own home in 1963. By 1965 Ken Kesey was rhapsodizing over building one in which to hold an Acid Test. In 1967 the two dozen founders of Drop City attended a lecture by

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the fact that the years of its publication overlapped the peak of American involvement in Southeast Asia, the Catalog almost completely ignored the conflict. Like Ken Kesey at Vietnam Day in 1965, it turned away from the war and the protestors alike. Only in 1971, long after the Tet Offensive and the

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, “it wasn’t a Buckleyite conservatism that got me—it was the individualist, anti-statist conservatism that got me.” At about the same time that Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were rejecting the politics of the New Left and the hippies of the Haight were heading back to the land, Rossetto

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28, 1963. 36. Perry et al., On the Bus, 11. See also Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams. 37. Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, 200. 38. Ken Kesey, “A Successful Dope Fiend,” 4. 39. Brand, “Notebooks,” December 18, 1962. 40. Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 13. 41. Lardas, Bop Apocalypse, 4. 42

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: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller. New York: Morrow, 1973. Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Kesey, Ken. “Ken Kesey Was a Successful Dope Fiend.” In Brand, Whole Earth Catalog One Dollar, 3 – 4. ———. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a Novel. New York

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Cyberspace.” In Smith and Kollock, Communities in Cyberspace, 220 –37. Kostelanetz, Richard. “Scene and Not Herd—USCO.” Harper’s Bazaar, December 1967. Krassner, Paul, and Ken Kesey, eds. The Realist Presents: The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog (Realist, no. 89). New York: Realist Association, March 1971. Kuznick, Peter J., and

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. New York: Random House, 1984. Perry, Paul, Ken Babbs, Michael Schwartz, and Neil Ortenberg. On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990. Pfaffenberger, Bryan. “The Social Meaning of the Personal

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

by John Markoff  · 1 Jan 2005  · 394pp  · 108,215 words

area’s unruly threads of political and cultural unrest. The group had emerged directly from a set of wrenching, mind-expanding LSD parties orchestrated by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters called Acid Tests, which would transform the culture of the Midpeninsula and ultimately the rest of the country. Now, more than

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individual. Hubbard is intriguing in part because while most popular accounts of the introduction of LSD in America focus on the roles played by author Ken Kesey and psychologist Timothy Leary, Hubbard was an earlier proponent, and an important influence in the use of psychedelics by a number of Silicon Valley’s

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flustered. The bohemian tradition continued for half a century, and in 1959 a Stanford graduate student named Vic Lovell convinced young writer and fellow student Ken Kesey to take part in a series of experiments with psychedelic drugs being conducted at the Menlo Park Veterans’ Administration Hospital. Lovell later became the first

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-Ottawa Native American, Lois Jennings, as the two bounce along in a truck Brand is driving through the San Francisco hills as they wait for Ken Kesey to get out of jail. Fadiman is described as the nephew of Clifton Fadiman, the writer and editor who was known for the encyclopedic knowledge

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on the Midpeninsula that shook the whole culture. That evening, the Rolling Stones were playing at the Cow Palace in south San Francisco, and author Ken Kesey suggested to a young guitarist named Jerry Garcia that he bring his band to Big Nig’s, a club in San Jose, to play at

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out-of-the-way community created a brief local sensation in the Bay Area. But it turned out to be just a stunt pulled by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, one perfectly suited to the times, which were rapidly beginning to tumble out of control. Driving down La Honda Road on the

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last minute to help polish the presentation and help make it an “event.” The unstated connection, of course, was Brand’s background in helping orchestrate Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests. English and Brand had met through Dick Raymond, who along with a quirky independent computer educator named Bob Albrecht and several others

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interest in Native American cultures. Starting in 1964, he had begun performing his own multimedia presentation called “America Needs Indians.” Brand was also close to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and in 1966 he had helped organize the last of the Acid Tests, which served to launch the Grateful Dead. On

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on the SRI–Stanford University connection. As a former infantryman, however, he found he had little patience for the antiwar activists. In 1965, he joined Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters at a Vietnam Day Committee rally in Berkeley where Kesey had been invited to speak. Kesey climbed onstage dressed in a

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curious about it. Dave Evans was one of the Augment team members who had strong ties to the counterculture, and one evening Stewart Brand brought Ken Kesey by for a look at the NLS system. It was several years after the Merry Prankster era and Kesey’s legal problems over a marijuana

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson  · 6 Oct 2014  · 720pp  · 197,129 words

Processing Techniques Office. Doug Engelbart publishes “Augmenting Human Intellect.” 1963 Licklider proposes an “Intergalactic Computer Network.” Engelbart and Bill English invent the mouse. 1972 1964 Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters take bus trip across America. 1965 Ted Nelson publishes first article about “hypertext.” Moore’s Law predicts microchips will double in

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power each year or so. 1966 Stewart Brand hosts Trips Festival with Ken Kesey. Bob Taylor convinces ARPA chief Charles Herzfeld to fund ARPANET. Donald Davies coins the term packet switching. 1967 ARPANET design discussions in Ann Arbor and

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, and not something you could run down to Radio Shack and buy. The digital age could not become truly transformational until computers became truly personal. Ken Kesey (1935–2001) holding a flute on the bus. Stewart Brand (1938– ). The first issue, fall 1968. CHAPTER EIGHT THE PERSONAL COMPUTER “AS WE MAY THINK

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, put it, “We wanted there to be personal computers so that we could free ourselves from the constraints of institutions, whether government or corporate.”5 Ken Kesey was a muse of the hippie strand of this cultural tapestry. After graduating from the University of Oregon, he went to the Bay Area in

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.” It was about Engelbart’s oNLine System, not about the robot.42 As if to seal the marriage of the counterculture and cyberculture, Brand brought Ken Kesey to Engelbart’s lab to experience the oNLine System. Kesey, by then famous from Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, got a

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hold the stack of money while addressing the crowd, and he wrote the suggestions on a blackboard. Paul Krassner, who had been a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, gave an impassioned talk about the plight of the American Indians—“We ripped off the Indians when we came here!”—and said

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Brand found a way to stand at the locus where technology overlapped with community and the counterculture. He had produced the techno-psychedelic show at Ken Kesey’s Trips Festival, reported on Spacewar and Xerox PARC for Rolling Stone, aided and abetted Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, and founded the

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

by Malcolm Harris  · 14 Feb 2023  · 864pp  · 272,918 words

Stanford, Tim interned—where else?—at HP. Chapter 3.3 Personal Revolution Computers as Human Augmentation—LSD as Human Augmentation—Bob Kaufman: Black, Communist, Beat—Ken Kesey and Other CIA Experiments As so often happens on frontiers, land filled up fast in Silicon Valley, and settlers became workers. The Santa Clara County

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’s interest with his claim to know the best minds of his generation and where to find them.19 A Stanford creative-writing hotshot named Ken Kesey was turning on around the same time, right down the road.20 It was all so characteristically binary, and it appealed to the cultural elites

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winners in Palo Alto come to convince themselves and a surprising segment of the world that they were the real loser rebels? The case of Ken Kesey is illustrative. A college wrestling champion at Oregon, Kesey polarized the creative-writing community as a Stanford graduate student in the late 1950s. Program director

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steel door in the rear of the Nurses’ Station. A number of Order Daily Cards are returned, punched with a pattern of little square holes.” Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Penguin Books, 2016), 28. xii For all his big talk, when confronted with an actual mental patient who

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in the previous section, the personal revolution didn’t have much to do with protest or collective action except in the existential sense. Politically, the Ken Kesey types were worse than useless to leftists. Many of them were war workers, engaged in the global decolonization struggle but on the colonists’ side. Think

Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

by Hunter S. Thompson  · 1 Jan 1966  · 308pp  · 103,890 words

, to buy their own booze and hustle a less complicated breed of pussy. The only really successful connection I made for the Angels was with Ken Kesey, a young novelist‡‡ living in the woods near La Honda, south of San Francisco. During 1965 and ’66 Kesey was arrested twice for possession of

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal  · 21 Feb 2017  · 407pp  · 90,238 words

a warning about the lure of ecstasis. This is no idle warning. History is littered with tales of ecstatic explorations gone wrong. Consider the 1960s. Ken Kesey snuck LSD out of a Stanford research lab and all manner of tie-dyed hell broke loose. The same thing happened with the sexual revolution

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unleashing a leviathan: the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. Almost exactly twenty-five hundred years after Alcibiades’s first stole kykeon, a young student named Ken Kesey poached some too—only this time it was from the CIA. Like Alcibiades, Kesey was disarmingly persuasive and controversial, wangling his way to a tuition

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Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves

by Matthew Sweet  · 13 Feb 2018  · 493pp  · 136,235 words

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein  · 17 Mar 2009  · 1,037pp  · 294,916 words

Howard Rheingold

by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)  · 26 Apr 2012

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future

by Jean M. Twenge  · 25 Apr 2023  · 541pp  · 173,676 words

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters  · 15 Sep 2014  · 185pp  · 43,609 words

Clock of the Long Now

by Stewart Brand  · 1 Jan 1999  · 194pp  · 49,310 words

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

by Peter Marshall  · 2 Jan 1992  · 1,327pp  · 360,897 words

They All Came to Barneys: A Personal History of the World's Greatest Store

by Gene Pressman  · 2 Sep 2025  · 313pp  · 107,586 words

Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry  · 1 Jan 2008  · 362pp  · 95,782 words

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact

by Steven Kotler  · 11 May 2015  · 294pp  · 80,084 words

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases

by Paul A. Offit  · 1 Jan 2007  · 300pp  · 84,762 words

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

Coastal California Travel Guide

by Lonely Planet

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

by Meredith Broussard  · 19 Apr 2018  · 245pp  · 83,272 words

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World

by Adrian Wooldridge  · 2 Jun 2021  · 693pp  · 169,849 words

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

by Paul Stamets  · 14 Apr 2005  · 732pp  · 151,889 words

From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture

by Theodore Roszak  · 31 Aug 1986

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio Garcia Martinez  · 27 Jun 2016  · 559pp  · 155,372 words

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America

by Ryan Grim  · 7 Jul 2009  · 334pp  · 93,162 words

Frommer's Memorable Walks in San Francisco

by Erika Lenkert  · 15 Mar 2003  · 188pp  · 57,229 words

You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction--From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between

by Lee Gutkind  · 13 Aug 2012  · 347pp  · 90,234 words

Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature

by Ben Mezrich  · 3 Jul 2017

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard  · 3 May 2021  · 392pp  · 124,069 words

The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better

by Will Storr  · 3 Apr 2019  · 234pp  · 68,798 words

How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers

by Richard Cohen  · 16 May 2016

Against Everything: Essays

by Mark Greif  · 5 Sep 2016  · 319pp  · 103,707 words

Lonely Planet Pocket San Francisco

by Lonely Planet and Alison Bing  · 31 Aug 2012

Frommer's San Francisco 2012

by Matthew Poole, Erika Lenkert and Kristin Luna  · 4 Oct 2011

Free Ride

by Robert Levine  · 25 Oct 2011  · 465pp  · 109,653 words

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

by Bethany Moreton  · 15 May 2009  · 391pp  · 22,799 words

The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

by Hunter S. Thompson  · 6 Nov 2003  · 893pp  · 282,706 words

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO

by Felix Gillette and John Koblin  · 1 Nov 2022  · 575pp  · 140,384 words

Running Money

by Andy Kessler  · 4 Jun 2007  · 323pp  · 92,135 words

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America

by David Callahan  · 9 Aug 2010

What Should I Do With My Life?

by Po Bronson  · 2 Jan 2001  · 446pp  · 138,827 words

Frommer's California 2009

by Matthew Poole, Harry Basch, Mark Hiss and Erika Lenkert  · 2 Jan 2009

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

by Andrew Smith  · 3 Apr 2006  · 409pp  · 138,088 words

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

by David Brin  · 1 Jan 1998  · 205pp  · 18,208 words

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

by Timothy Ferriss  · 6 Dec 2016  · 669pp  · 210,153 words

Frommer's California 2007

by Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert and Matthew Richard Poole  · 6 Dec 2006  · 769pp  · 397,677 words

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse

by Adrian Wooldridge  · 29 Nov 2011  · 460pp  · 131,579 words

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age

by Matthew Cobb  · 15 Nov 2022  · 772pp  · 150,109 words

Dealers of Lightning

by Michael A. Hiltzik  · 27 Apr 2000  · 559pp  · 157,112 words

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

by Kurt Andersen  · 14 Sep 2020  · 486pp  · 150,849 words

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life

by Pam Grout  · 14 May 2007  · 304pp  · 87,702 words

A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar  · 11 Jun 1998  · 998pp  · 211,235 words

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath

by Nicco Mele  · 14 Apr 2013  · 270pp  · 79,992 words

Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability Through Risk Control

by Kenneth L. Grant  · 1 Sep 2004

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There

by David Brooks  · 1 Jan 2000  · 142pp  · 18,753 words

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

by Dan Lyons  · 22 Oct 2018  · 252pp  · 78,780 words

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant  · 19 Jun 2017  · 416pp  · 129,308 words

Frommer's Irreverent Guide to San Francisco

by Matthew Richard Poole  · 17 Mar 2006  · 255pp  · 90,456 words

Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler  · 1 Jun 1984  · 286pp  · 94,017 words

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

by Will Storr  · 14 Jun 2017  · 431pp  · 129,071 words

The Unicorn's Secret

by Steven Levy  · 6 Oct 2016

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

by Matthew B. Crawford  · 8 Jun 2020  · 386pp  · 113,709 words

Future Sex

by Emily Witt  · 10 Oct 2016  · 197pp  · 64,958 words

Better Than Fiction

by Lonely Planet  · 253pp  · 79,441 words

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World

by Jamie Bartlett  · 12 Jun 2017  · 390pp  · 109,870 words

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything

by Steven Levy  · 2 Feb 1994  · 244pp  · 66,599 words

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder  · 18 Sep 2017  · 273pp  · 85,195 words

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

by Max Fisher  · 5 Sep 2022  · 439pp  · 131,081 words

Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'Connell's Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People

by Tracy Kidder  · 17 Jan 2023  · 270pp  · 88,213 words

Portland Like a Local

by DK  · 162pp  · 32,864 words