One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey Book
by Ken Kesey

Book Comments & Discussion (2)

MrsMilanoOPFeb 2010

This is a very human story, with a lot of suffering and exploration of man's insecurities.

ApronangelMar 5, 2010

If you've seen the movie, read the book.

I hadn't seen the movie when I was reading the book. An older friend of mine told me how he had snuck into the cinema (He was underage to see it) many moons ago when it was released and he went on to read the book because the movie had such an affect on him. I was reading it at the time he told me.

It portrays the human condition of individuality, the Chief for me is the one character that truly shows how someone can be pigeon-holed and how someone can have a reality that is truly at odds with their own self. He knew himself, no-one else did.

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Storyline

An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s.

A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results.

With One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey created a work without precedent in American literature, a novel at once comic and tragic that probes the nature of madness and sanity, authority and vitality. Greeted by unanimous acclaim when it was first published, the book has become and enduring favorite of readers.