A lucid memoir that captures the hippie era of the sixties, the highs and lows of the psychedelic drug scene in New York City's East Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury during the "Summer of Love." The author conveys the shifting fortunes and mental state of his "acid head" narrator, recalls that scene and the young man he was with sardonic humor. His chronological yet nonlinear tale, covering the year 1967, is a pastiche of discrete, titled stories. The various pieces mesh and the overall tale of transformation and disintegration moves toward its denouement with mounting dread. Meanwhile, the awareness that suffuses the story keeps it sharp and unsentimental, so that even as the protagonist loses his mind, his confusion is rarely solemn, but gritty, or hilarious, and sometimes both at the same time.

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