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Loading... One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)by Ken Kesey
  
» 91 more Favourite Books (66) BBC Big Read (98) 1960s (4) A Novel Cure (68) Best Satire (45) Unreliable Narrators (58) Readable Classics (58) Top Five Books of 2016 (499) First Novels (20) Books Read in 2016 (1,835) 100 World Classics (54) Five star books (513) Read (71) Books Read in 2022 (2,189) Animals in the Title (16) Read These Too (25) Catalog (1) Put a Bird On It (14) Overdue Podcast (216) Penguin Random House (23) Books Read in 2018 (3,670) Books I've Read (33) Books Read in 2012 (98) Pageturners (36) Books tagged favorites (286) Fiction For Men (90) AP Lit (149) Books Tagged Abuse (41) Greatest Books (438) USA Road Trip (42) Fave Books (12) My Favourite Books (71) Speculative Fiction (15) Books tagged unread (15) LT picks: Blue Books (193) Unread books (908) No current Talk conversations about this book. This book is like watching a train wreck. Its starts of reel slow and builds up steam towards the inevitable ending. Now reader beware there are some very difficult and conflicting themes that are covered in the book such as how mental illness was treated in mental institutions using electroshock therapy and lobotomies. Also covered is racism, gender bias and violence. Having said all that, I can understand why this book is considered an American classic as the writing and the flow of the story is admirable. Having watched the movie and being a fan of Jack Nicholson I enjoyed the book as it is told from the viewpoint of the Indian chief which allows for his thoughts and emotions to come through in the story. I would recommend this book but not for sensitive readers. (  ) thanesh | May 8, 2023 |  A much denser book than I anticipated that allowed for a lot of reflection regarding mental health and mental illness. I’m always interested by seemingly unreliable narrators, especially in this book which uses heavy imagery to put you in the same mindset as your narrator. The ending seemed to move much more quickly than the beginning which could be attributed to the much more chaotic mentality of the characters. Overall enjoyable and glad to have read the classic without seeing the movie. (  ) clougreen | Apr 25, 2023 | I am not a fan of the beat generation, nor of the general concept of anti-establishment literature. Nonetheless, this was an excellent story which I enjoyed very much. The author has a simple and straightforward writing style which flows seamlessly. It was easy to follow the various characters, and I appreciated both the storyline and particularly the ending. A book that is sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous, sometimes surprising. Recommended. ( ) la2bkk | Mar 11, 2023 | Classic Kesey.. what more can be said? "Juicy Fruit?".. LOL ( ) Jonathan5 | Feb 20, 2023 | This is one of those books that you hear about for years but probably don't ever actually read. At least it was for me. Until I saw it on a buy-2-for-1-credit sale at Audible. My next task was listening to it. It sat in my TBR list for several months and then my chance came: needing a book for the monthly book review podcast I co-host. Boom! It only took a few minutes to talk my friends into it and we were set. Like many older books I've read, I was initially caught off guard by heavy racism and racist epithets used throughout. Eventually, I get to the point where I acknowledge them and move on because they're part of the time period and, while certainly not acceptable, they were a part of the vernacular used by white folks whether they considered themselves racist or not. Again, I'm not excusing any of it. About halfway through the book, I decided to watch the movie. Immediately, I missed being inside the head of our narrator, The Chief. I loved him so much and wished more of him came through in the film. But instead, it's all about McMurphy. Which, I suppose, isn't too different from the book, except we're getting Bromden's interpretation of McMurphy. I didn't care much for or about McMurphy but he certainly was the central character. It would take a while for me to get all of my feelings about the book down here but if you're interested in the book, we ended up having a fantastic discussion on Cocktail Hour (http://cocktailhour.us/archives/1262). I love how three people reading the same thing take so many different things from it. One of the biggest aspects we talked about was how misogyny was everywhere and that two of us didn't really pay that much attention to it. That bit of the conversation has stuck with me since. Bottom line, I loved the writing and the style and I really loved Bromden. Be warned there's plenty of racist and misogynistic language but if you're up for it, I highly recommend it. (  )1  amcheri | Jan 5, 2023 |
 As a postgraduate student in the writing program at Stanford, Kesey was in on some early LSD experiments at a veterans' hospital, and Chief Broom's subjective vision is full of dislocations and transformations, but Kesey is systematic in fusing Christian mythology with the American myth of the white man and the noble red man fighting against the encroachment of civilization, represented by women. Though in modern society women are as much subject to the processes of mechanized conformity as men (some say more), the inmates of this symbolic hospital are all male, and McMurphy calls them "victims of a matriarchy." There's a long literary tradition behind this man's-man view of women as the castrater-lobotomizers; Kesey updated it, on the theory that comic-strip heroes are the true American mythic heroes, and in terms of public response to the book and to the stage productions of it he proved his point. The novel is comic-book Freud: the man who achieves his manhood (keeping women under him, happy whores in bed) is the free man—he's the buckaroo with the power of laughter. Leslie Fiedler described Kesey's novel as "the dream once dreamed in the woods, and now redreamed on pot and acid." Kesey's concept of male and female is not so very remote from that in Mailer's writing, though Kesey celebrates keeping the relationships at a mythic comic-strip level, while Mailer, in his foolhardy greatness, delves into his own comic-strip macho.  The world of this brilliant first novel is Inside—inside a mental hospital and inside the blocked minds of its inmates. Sordid sights and sounds abound, but Novelist Kesey has not descended to mere shock treatment or isolation-ward documentary. His book is a strong, warm story about the nature of human good and evil, despite its macabre setting.  What Mr. Kesey has done in his unusual novel is to transform the plight of a ward of inmates in a mental institution into a glittering parable of good and evil. Belongs to Publisher SeriesBlackbirds (1993.1) — 10 more Is contained inHas the adaptationIs abridged inHas as a studyHas as a commentary on the textHas as a student's study guide
A criminal feigns insanity and is admitted to a mental hospital where he challenges the autocratic authority of the head nurse. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.14)
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