Thomas Fensch

Alice in Acidland Thomas Fensch

If you love Lewis Carroll, or if you remember the hippie days -- the flower power generation -- of the 1960s, you'll love Alice in Acidland. Was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland really a drug trip? Men who cleaned top hats in the days of Charles Dodgson's England used solutions of mercury, which caused brain damage: thus "mad as a hatter." Could the caterpillar really have been smoking something hallucinogenic in his waterpipe? Charles Dodgson may have passed Thomas DeQuincey on the streets of London -- after all -- this was generally the same era that DeQuincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Originally published in 1970, Alice in Acidland suggests that Alice's experiences - -and the curiouser and curiouser animals that she encounters -- echo the LSD trips of the hippie 1960s - -and could easily have been visualized by Thomas DeQuincey and the mad hatters of Lewis Carroll's time . . . . The author suggests this all with tongue-firmly-in-cheek. We think.