In this classic 1960s novel, Ken Kesey's hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy. You've never met anyone like Randle Patrick McMurphy. 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, and at every turn, 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, an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Big Nurse, backed by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Big Nurse uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the story's shocking climax.
The counterculture embraced this allegory of individualism versus the establishment, which, as a film, gave Jack Nicholson one of his more memorable roles. Cowed by sadistic Nurse Ratched, the inmates of a mental hospital are galvanized by a new patient, the free-spirited McMurphy, who enters a pitched battle of wills with the nurse. Narrator Tom Parker does a workmanlike, if somewhat detached, job; his tone nicely mirrors the iconoclasm in his text but doesn't quite nail the personality of the first-person narrator. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Ken Kesey (1935-2002) was born in La Junta, Colorado, and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. As a young man he exhibited the charisma and imagination that would later make him an icon and one of the founders of the American counterculture. In high school he received both the Woodrow Wilson Scholarship to Stanford and a Saxton Fellowship and won the Fred Lowe Scholarship awarded to the outstanding wrestler in the Northwest. Enrolling in a prestigious creative writing program at Stanford University, he began to attract notice. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was followed by Sometimes a Great Notion. His bus trip from his home in La Honda, California, to New York City with his friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters became the subject of Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
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