

And you have to stand back in awe of the man's ability to create character."Ībout the Author Ken Kesey was born in 1935 and grew up in Oregon. you cannot help but admire Kesey's vigor, his profligate command of the language. Set against the damp and brutal background of an Oregon logging community, the book by turns gasps, pants, whoops, and shrieks. The New York Times Book Review "A tremendous achievement. Kesey in the fullness of his material discovers them for us." Beyond the PTA and the beer commercials, beyond the huge effluvium of the times, exist people who live by the ancient passions, and Mr. Gleason, San Francisco Chronicle " Sometimes a Great Notion, a big book in every way, captures the tenor of the post-Korea America as nothing I can remember reading. When Kesey describes the Canada honkers flying over the woods you can almost see them when he describes the smells of the grass and the tastes of the strawberries you feel and you smell and you taste." and then there is that great gift for comedy, for purely sensational writing. Getting into this book is getting into a fascinating, crazy world of a fascinating, crazy family which has a throbbing reality and a desperate dedication to living. "As in Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey brings to life people you will never forget. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals, Ken Kesey crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy. And then there is Leland, Henry's bookish younger son, who returns to his family on a mission of vengeance - and finds himself fulfilling it in ways he never imagined. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers: Henry, the fiercely vital and overpowering patriarch Hank, the son who has spent his life trying to live up to his father and Viv, who fell in love with Hank's exuberant machismo but now finds it wearing thin. A bitter strike is raging in a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. About the Book The Stampers, a logging family pit by circumstance against big business, are rough, hard men and women who live by the motto "never give an inch." Added to the turmoil is the return of Leland, a dope-smoking, college-educated half-brother whose arrival triggers a tidal wave of events that spiral gradually out of control.īook Synopsis The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sailor Song is a wild-spirited and hugely powerful tale of an Oregon logging clan.
