Paperback, 320 pages
English language
Published Jan. 11, 2007 by Penguin Classics.
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Now in a new deluxe edition with a foreword by Chuck Palahniuk and cover by Joe Sacco, here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them all imprisoned.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts …
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Now in a new deluxe edition with a foreword by Chuck Palahniuk and cover by Joe Sacco, here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them all imprisoned.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/322088/one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest-by-ken-kesey/9780143105022
This book was quite an amazing read. I loved following the adventures of McMurphy as he bucked against the system and tried to help those around him. Seeing through the eyes of Bromden with his psychedelic descriptions were like watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon and really made this story enjoyable.
Ken Kesey wrote an absolutely perfect story, the plot grips you asking what McMurphy will dare next, written from a perspective that happily contextualizes and compares the exploits of McMurphy, until the very end. This is a must read book for anyone interested psychiatry and a tribute to Ken Kesey's literary power.
I really enjoyed this book. I'd been spoiled by the (also classic) movie, but there was plenty of extra perspective and detail to make it worth experiencing in its original form. Kesey's straight forward, spoken word style is charming, occasionally devastating, and definitely hard to put down.
I've been aware of Ken Kesey for a long time, since I've read books by or about people he associated with, like [a:Neal Cassady|79334|Neal Cassady|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1267720258p2/79334.jpg], [a:Jack Kerouac|1742|Jack Kerouac|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1544568646p2/1742.jpg] and [a:Allen Ginsberg|4261|Allen Ginsberg|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1421583811p2/4261.jpg]. I've also been aware of this book for a long time, and knew it was set in a lunatic asylum, but had never read it before.
But though I have known about it for a long time, it was not long enough. I should have read it in my late teens or early twenties, which was when I was most concerned about the boundaries between sanity and madness. That was when I most appreciated Ginsberg's poem Howl, written for his friend Carl Solomon, who had the electric shock therapy that was then a fashionable treatment for certain kinds of mental illness.
Most of the action in the book takes place in a ward of a mental hospital, presided …
I've been aware of Ken Kesey for a long time, since I've read books by or about people he associated with, like [a:Neal Cassady|79334|Neal Cassady|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1267720258p2/79334.jpg], [a:Jack Kerouac|1742|Jack Kerouac|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1544568646p2/1742.jpg] and [a:Allen Ginsberg|4261|Allen Ginsberg|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1421583811p2/4261.jpg]. I've also been aware of this book for a long time, and knew it was set in a lunatic asylum, but had never read it before.
But though I have known about it for a long time, it was not long enough. I should have read it in my late teens or early twenties, which was when I was most concerned about the boundaries between sanity and madness. That was when I most appreciated Ginsberg's poem Howl, written for his friend Carl Solomon, who had the electric shock therapy that was then a fashionable treatment for certain kinds of mental illness.
Most of the action in the book takes place in a ward of a mental hospital, presided over by a tyrannical nurse, whose measure of her patients' progress is how amenable and cooperative they are with her arbitrary rules. Her rule is threatened by a new patient, McMurphy, who questions the rules and the values behind them, and keeps demanding changes, while the nurse keeps threatening him with electric shock therapy.
McMurphy is a disruptive influence in the ward, at least in the eyes of the nurse, but he manages ro secure a brief respite for some of the patients when he organises a deep-sea fishing trip away from the hospital, and they have to cope with all kinds of obstacles that threaten to scupper it. Are the loonies managing to function in a sane society, or are they in fact the only sane ones in a mad society where everyone seems out to get them and make their lives miserable?
As I often do, I've posted an expanded version of this on my blog here One flew over the cuckoo’s nest | Notes from underground. This goes beyond the bookitself, and looks at the times in which it was written and published, and something of the Zeitgeist.
Years ago I saw the film and my daughter studying the book for her final year in secondary school gave me the opportunity to read the book. In a lot of ways, the film followed the book quite closely, at least as far as I can remember after quite some years. But of course one of the distinctive aspects of the book is that the narrator is also one of the main characters, which in this case means it is told from the point of view of a person with mental illness. Sensibly, the film didn't try that, proving that once again no amount of special effects can match the imagination of a reader. I would like to think that the abuse of patients in mental hospitals no longer happens in the way that the book so graphically describes, though it would be naive to think that new methods haven't …
Years ago I saw the film and my daughter studying the book for her final year in secondary school gave me the opportunity to read the book. In a lot of ways, the film followed the book quite closely, at least as far as I can remember after quite some years. But of course one of the distinctive aspects of the book is that the narrator is also one of the main characters, which in this case means it is told from the point of view of a person with mental illness. Sensibly, the film didn't try that, proving that once again no amount of special effects can match the imagination of a reader. I would like to think that the abuse of patients in mental hospitals no longer happens in the way that the book so graphically describes, though it would be naive to think that new methods haven't come in their places. Nevertheless, the challenge that Kesey faces us with as to what our attitude is to people with mental illness and how much we might go along with societal problems being out of sight and so out of mind and so conveniently not in need of a solution, are just as valid today.
A classic tale into the human mind; I was quite fond on the movie but the book was way different and much more interesting. A dark and at times humorous look into a Psychiatric hospital and the institution processes used in this asylum. This was a story of the fine balance between treatment and processes; there is a balance between healing the mind and just controlling the patients.
I was very interested in the way these patients lived and how their healing process was disrupted at times by the doctors and nurses. I’m not an expert with mental health but I think I gained an insight into just how fragile the human mind can be. This book was really enjoyable and would recommend it to anyone interested in psychology.
