One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Rating:
Summary: "I liked it very much."
Review: Dear "Amazon" Folks: Here is a book review by Claire Min-Venditti, age 6, dictated to her dad after he read the book to her over a period of 3 weeks: The book was called "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." It had a guy in it named McMurphy, and he was a pretty good trickster and gambler. He tells lies a lot to people, but the book did not have a happy ending. There were a lot of people in it, but it was a good story. I like it. It was written by Ken Kesey, and it's about a mental hospital and a nurse that runs it, and she's mean to the patients. And McMurphy just came in because he's a new patient to come to the hospital. He was trying to get out of the hospital, because he didn't want to get treated that way anymore, so at recess time he climbed over the fence because there was this guy, and they called him "Chief," and he was big and strong and tall, and he was pretending that he was deaf and dumb. So McMurphy got on his shoulders and climbed up the fence because he was very tall. And there was a bus there, which he snuck into and drew the other patients away and drove them away in the bus. And it picked up one of his girlfriends, and he went fishing without permission. When he got to the fishing place, he told the captain that he was going to go fishing. And he paid to go fishing, and the captain said, "If you want to go fishing, you have to tell me if anyone will let you go fishing." So he told the captain to call an old abandoned hotel in Canada, but when the captain was about to tell him that he was already on his way on the boat, fishing. So when he came back, the police were there, but he didn't get arrested for taking the boat, but he still paid. That night, his two girlfriends came over and bought some wine and they had a wonderful party and messed up all the things and played tag down the hall in wheelchairs and sprinkled cough medicine all over people's heads. And they had a lot of fun, and they told the girls they could stay there overnight, and the nurse didn't like that. The next morning, the nurse came and saw all that mess, and she was very mad. And she saw a patient named Billy sleeping with one of the girls, because he fell in love with her. And she said that she was going to tell his mother, and he didn't want that to happen, so he went into a room by himself and killed himself with a broken glass. And then one of the younger nurses saw him and came screaming out of that room and told the bigger nurse when it happened. And so everyone was trying to look and see inside of the room, but the big nurse shoved them out. But later, after that, when they were sleeping, they cut out part of McMurphy's brain so he was turned into a vegetable, and he couldn't talk and he couldn't walk. And the Chief, the big strong guy, came over to his bed with his pillow and smothered him. He was so strong and big that he picked up the control panel in the tub room and threw it out the window, and it broke the glass, and he was free because he didn't like that place at all because the big nurse treated him and all the other people so bad. I think only a little bit of people would like this book, because it doesn't have a happy ending, and the big nurse doesn't treat anybody good in the book.

Rating:
Summary: This book changed my life.
Review: I first read "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in a mental hospital at age 17. Three days after finishing it, I was released. Since that time, I have written countless papers on the book, a biography of the author, and taught the film in a freshman composition class as a graduate student teaching assistant. I attribute a good deal of my present sanity to the drastic re-ordering I got from reading that book. The levels Kesey relates, political, spiritual, (even biblical), and psychological, are astounding.

Rating:
Summary: The best book I've ever read
Review: I first read this book when I was 14, and I've reread it five times since. It is, quite simply, the best book I've ever read.

This is a story about rules -- who makes them, who enforces them, and why. Randall P. McMurphy is a boisterous, bawdy gambler/conman who's faked his way into a mental institution. Nurse Ratchett is the dictatorial head nurse who *does not like* any disturbances on her ward. These are two high-ego and passionate characters who lock horns.

Ken Kesey's writing is exceptional. The characters are believable and the dialogue spurs you through the book. The book is even better than the Oscar-winning movie with Jack Nicholson.

Rating:
Summary: Look at the world inside-out!
Review: What is the world you see when you read this book? It may not be real, but that doesn't make it any less true. Here is a place where feelings become sensations and overpower the "real world". On the face of it, the action takes place in a lunatic asylum. It could just as well be our world. It's populated by a lot of characters that feel more sane than the keepers of the place. The maker of all the rules - the Big Nurse - is the scariest of all, in her confidence that this is entirely her world, run as she likes. Enter Randall Patrick Macmurphy. Rules? What rules? They don't exist as far as he's concerned. This world is just another to be moulded to his liking. Within a minute of his entry, he's run up against the Nurse. Every inmate sees something new about life- it's possible not to follow someone else's rules and live to tell the tale. The Nurse's world cracks up, bit by bit. R.P.Mcmurphy too realizes the extent to which it's possible to fall into the games life creates. This is one character you'll remember forever - and the lesson he preaches. All the inmates - you included - learn that the game is a game only as long as you know you're playing it. Get caught up and you're just a token on the board. Ken Kesey talks through Chief Bromden - an indian who plays at being deaf and dumb in an effort to run from the game. Grammar is an easy prey to the Chief's onrushing thoughts as he struggles to keep up with the speed of events around him. The prose sparkles with electricity as he "sees" his feelings and expresses them as events. Hostility in the air becomes a chill, and the sensation of death is falling into a furnace. This is a book that reads like walking through a "hall of crazy mirrors". You look back on yourself and don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Rating:
Summary: One flew east, one flew west...
Review: The novel is told in the first-person from the POV of Chief Broom. Early on, it becomes clear that he is the "unreliable narrator" in the Edgar Allen Poe sense. The Chief may be faking deafness, but it is obvious through his descriptions that he is a schizophrenic who suffers from hallucinations. It is up to the reader to sort out the "real" from the "imaginary."

Although Broom and his fellow inmates are insane, they are still good people and they do not deserve the treatment they receive at the hands of the evil Nurse Ratched. She is one of the most memorably evil villains in all literature. Even though she is only a nurse, she is in complete control of the entire hospital. What she wants is for everything to run like clockwork. She does not want anyone to ever "get better." In walks Randall Patrick MacMurphy. Like Hamlet, MacMurphy fakes madness (in order to get out of a labor camp). He soon sets himself up as the ward's personal savior (there is a lot of Christ imagery) and engages in a war with Nurse Ratched.

This is a great book that is really about non-conformity; the tyranny of people who dictate what is "normal" and what is not. The only flaw is a strain of misogyny that runs through the subtext. There is a lot of talk of how men shouldn't be bossed around by women and how they should be kept in their place. Granted, this is the characters speaking and not Ken Kesey, but the message is there. After all, this is a book that culminates in an act of violence against a woman. It's a shame because it is a great book and just because Nurse Ratched is evil, there is no need to extend the message towards women in general.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books ever
Review: Easily my favorite book. There are 4 or 5 characters that are so interesting that they could have written an entire book about them alone. The book never fails to surprise you, right up til the very end and has a good message about living life to the fullest.

Rating:
Summary: wkrc wcpo cpo drehz
Review: Your mother is insistent...

What do you do for a living?

memetic foraging money methods mother


drez thinks he's Uncle Al calling a mother

world biochemical com totes krc?


milch sagte drez softly



rob lang kit tim?

the fullerene bucky tube from try our pineal TATA homeobox

we have an array of handsome technology for you to have
and to cherish until death do you part

Synchrotron Lithography Div.

The Great Imitator is an Illusion.


what daedalus

blinks of target character on tube..

pings for each time they blink

your exchange can list odds

somebody after drehz?

not us... we work too

drehz say goodnight drehz


jesus save borneo horticulturists cup for you drehz...

Tomorrow testing the olfactory electronics and blink timing chain

only needs to be hooked up

Rating:
Summary: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Review: Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a classic anti-authority novel and a pretty good read. The story is told by Chief Bromden, a fragile giant who has delusions about the Combine, a conspiracy that runs the economy and keeps the population under control. In the mental hospital where he lives, the Combine is capably represented by Nurse Ratched, a rather tightly wound mother figure. Using a combination of psychological manipulation, drugs, and shock therapy, she and the rest of the staff keep the inmates in a passive state of acquiescence until her system is upset by the arrival of McMurphy, a red-headed drifter and non-conformist. The point of the book, of course, is to show how socialization processes have a homogenizing, leveling effect. Societies work best when people are interchangeable; exceptional people, or people who can't fit in, are usually not welcome.

Rating:
Summary: Unforgetable -- and Brilliant!
Review: In his attempt to convey what he believed to be "the essentially schizophrenic nature of mankind," Kesey, rather than telling the tale from the perspective of an uninvolved "God-Narrator," or from that of R. P. McMurphy, who might have been too involved in the main action, opted to present the story from the point of view of one of the psycho ward's bystanding schizophrenic inmates; "the Big Chief."

By telling the tale through the Chief's schizophrenic eyes, Kesey was able to, not merely "tell" the tale from an "eye witness perspective," but actually "show" the tale in a sort of "poetic-sensurround;" the reader would come to understand and appreciate the healing effect provided by McMurphy's inspiring individualism as the Chief's narration became progressively less "schizophrenic," and more concrete and objective as the story moved forward.

Additionally, it gave Kesey a viable way to provide the story with a mystical, supernatural quality. This, in turn, enabled him to give full force and effect, through the Chief's altered perception, to his allegoric and metaphoric symbolism; allowed him to have the Chief see and hear impressionistic and imaginary stimuli as though they were solid objects and real actions and occurrences, allowed him to turn the verbal and mental sparring between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched into epic battles waged between mythical, larger-than-life titans, between the very forces of good and evil itself. In sum, it enabled Kesey to convey a deeper, more personal and more spiritual reality in his story, on a variety of psychological levels, and in a manner that allows the reader to experience events 1st hand, as a bystanding schizophrenic, rather than merely collect story-related data like a detached observer. This is certainly one novel you simply don't want to miss! Unforgetable in every way. Along with ONE FLEW, I'd like to recommend another Amazon quick-pick: THE LOSERS CLUB by Richard Perez


Rating:
Summary: one flew over the cookoo's nest
Review: This book was a very interesting read. Never giving much thought to the way mental health hospitals worked myself, I found it very eye opening to see just how wrong one could go. Yes I know the book is fiction, but it was very believable. MY favorite character was Randal McMurphy. "Is he really insane? Or is he just faking it to get out of the work camp and to make some quick money off these crazies?" You won't find out until the end if his intensions are noble or not. I really loved this book. The men on the ward break free from the over powering Nurse Ratchet and McMurphy leads the way. The book is never boring. The Patients are constantly testing the Nurses patients and control.