It was here, Markoff writes, that Brand developed a "coping mechanism" that became an "operating manual" for him throughout his life: "Brand figured out that the best way to compete was not to follow the crowd but to instead chart his own iconoclastic path." In works ranging from Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - the book opens with Brand driving the famous Merry Prankster bus - to Fred Turner's 2004 study From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Brand found a way to put himself behind the wheel, most often by buying the car. Brand is lucky the book isn't a better one, for the sympathetic Markoff - a member of the same milieu as his subject, a fellow client of John Brockman who undertook the project at the suggestion of a former Brand deputy, Kevin Kelly - strains to depict him in a favorable light, at significant cost to the work's quality. B&A STEWART BRAND IS NOT A SCIENTIST. [Extracted from the article]