

Loading... One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)by Ken Kesey
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» 87 more Favourite Books (61) BBC Big Read (76) 1960s (4) A Novel Cure (59) Top Five Books of 2016 (499) Readable Classics (58) Books Read in 2016 (1,808) Five star books (327) First Novels (20) 100 World Classics (54) Read (29) Animals in the Title (15) Catalog (1) Books Read in 2018 (3,617) Read These Too (17) Books I've Read (33) Overdue Podcast (242) Pageturners (36) Books tagged favorites (286) Books Read in 2012 (96) Fiction For Men (90) Penguin Random House (43) Speculative Fiction (14) USA Road Trip (42) My Favourite Books (71) Fave Books (12) Best Satire (45) Unreliable Narrators (55) Books tagged unread (15) Books Tagged Abuse (41) Put a Bird On It (20) LT picks: Blue Books (193) Unread books (906) No current Talk conversations about this book. Undeniably powerful, engaging, moving and funny and it isn’t hard to see why it’s considered a classic. What’s surprising and disappointing though, for a book championed as being about the struggle against authority, is how white and male this feels. The battle between McMurphy and Ratched is explicitly framed by gender and, despite the Native American narrator, there is casual and objectionable racism throughout the book. ( ![]() I should have read the back of the book before borrowing this. I knew that this was the inspiration for a movie starring Jack Nicholson, and that it was about people in a mental institution. What I did not know was that Nicholson’s character was in the institution because he was trying to avoid hard labour after being imprisoned for raping a 15-year-old girl. I have no sympathy for him whatsoever. Such beautiful writing. One of my challenges this year was to read a book about people with mental illnesses. I have been meaning to read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey for years and had just never got around to it. I figured this would be the perfect opportunity. This is another book I loved almost all the way through. I found all the characters to be very interesting. The narration of the story by Chief Bromden was wonderful and watching him work through his problems and eventually making friends with the rebellious Randall McMurphy was unlike anything I've read. The whole thing culminates into a very depressing, sad, tragic ending that stayed with me for days. Thus, Roal Dahl was needed, as I said above. If you've never read it, it's truly epic, but be ready for the emotions, all the emotions! I think this is my favorite American novel, I've read it many times and seen the movie a fair number of times as well, and while that is a very fine movie it doesn't capture the chief as well as the book. Nicholson does a great job as Randle, but not enough screen time is given to the chief.
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) — 6 more Is contained inHas the adaptationIs abridged inHas as a studyHas as a commentary on the textHas as a student's study guide
He's a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the ward of a mental hospital and takes over. He's a lusty, profane, life-loving fighter who rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Big Nurse. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women; at every turn, he openly defies her rule. The contest starts as sport (with McMurphy taking bets on the outcome) but soon it develops into a grim struggle for the minds and hearts of the men, into an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Big Nurse, backed by the full power of authority ... McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. No library descriptions found. |
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54 — Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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