In 1975, the French philosopher Michel Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade, ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor. It was here that Foucault experimented with psychotropic drugs for the first time; by morning he was crying and proclaiming that he knew Truth. Witty and colorful, Wade's firsthand account of that long weekend in Death Valley also listens in on intensive dialogues between Foucault and his disciples at a Taoist utopia in the Angeles Forest, where this brilliant thinker is known as "Country Joe."