Showing posts with label Ken Kesey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ken Kesey. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Recommended reading – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

by Ken Kesey.
 
Paperback.
First published 1962.
Published by Picador.

ISBN 13: 9780774033442
ISBN 10: 0774033444
ASIN: 0774033444
 
Description:
 
An international bestseller and the basis for the hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of the defining works of the 1960s.
 
In this classic novel, Ken Kesey’s hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Nurse Ratched, backed by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the story’s shocking climax.
 
Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy – the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.
 
“BRILLIANT!” – Time.


On this day in movie history - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)


One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest


directed by Miloš Forman,

written by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman,

based on the novel by Ken Kesey,

was released in the United States on November 19, 1975.

Music by Jack Nitzsche.


Cast:
Jack Nicholson, Michael Berryman, Peter Brocco, Dean R. Brooks, Alonzo Brown, Scatman Crothers, Mwako Cumbuka, Danny DeVito, William Duell, Josip Elic, Lan Fendors, Louise Fletcher, Nathan George, Ken Kenny, Mel Lambert, Sydney Lassick, Kay Lee, Christopher Lloyd, Dwight Marfield, Ted Markland, Louisa Moritz, William Redfield, Philip Roth, Will Sampson, Mimi Sarkisian, Mews Small, Delos V. Smith, Tin Welch, Brad Dourif, Aurore Clément, Bill Gratton, Anjelica Huston, Ingeborg Kjeldsen, Audrey Landers, Tom McCall, James V. Shore, Saul Zaentz.

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Born on this day – Ken Kesey:


Ken Kesey


Writer

September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001


Author of some compelling works: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Sometimes a Great Notion.