One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Kesey renders his own characters exactly as he wrote them, giving perfect nuance to each one. Listeners who haven't seen the film will have little trouble getting into the story as the abridgment does not impact the main plot. An NPR interview with Kesey, included as the second half of the last disc, fleshes out the man behind the semiautobiographical story, with insight into his employment in a mental health facility as well as his experimentation with drugs. Through both the reading and the interview, Kesey is revealed as a deep thinking man with an affinity for many of his book's characters. S.M.M. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine


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