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Sometimes a Great Notion
 
 
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Sometimes a Great Notion [Paperback]

Ken Kesey (Author)
4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (139 customer reviews)

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Book Description

July 28, 1977
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.
A bitter strike is raging in a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. 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. 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. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals Ken Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

A contemporary classic. (Chicago Tribune)

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Ken Kesey was born in 1935 and grew up in Oregon. He graduated from the University of Oregon and later studied at Stanford with Wallace Stegner, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Scowcroft, and Frank O' Connor. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, his first novel, was published in 1962. His second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, followed in 1964. His other books include Kesey's Garage Sale, Demon Box, Caverns (with O. U. Levon), The Further Inquiry, Sailor Song, and Last Go Round (with Ken Babbs). His two children's books are Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear and The Sea Lion. Ken Kesey died on November 10, 2001.


Product Details

  • Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  • Paperback: 640 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (July 28, 1977)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0140045295
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140045291
  • Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (139 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #74,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ken Kesey was born in Colorado in 1935. He founded the Merry Pranksters in the sixties and became a cult hero, a phenomenon documented by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He died in 2001.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
146 of 154 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is the Kesey novel that nobody read after One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest stole all its thunder. Although it was filmed with an great cast (Henry Fonda, Paul Newman) it never gained the reputation that its inferior sibling achieved.
This is, quite simply, one of the great classics of the 20th century. Its pace and moody evocation of the American North West are stunning. The collision between the traditional and the modern, the past and the present make riveting, enthralling reading.
The Stamper family are loggers, rough, hard men and women who care for no ones opinion but their own. They are fighting the union, the neighbours, the town, their whole world. Their motto of "never give an inch" was the title of the film of the book. Into the strike-breaking start of the book comes the dope-smoking, college educated half brother, the prodigal son. His arrival triggers a tidal wave of events that spiral gradually out of control until everything that has been permanent before is now threatened.
If I seem vague in this review it is simply that I don't want to deprive you of the pleasure of discovering this story for yourself. This is one of the forgotten masterpieces. A book to be read, and then passed on to friends who are later bullied to give it back to be read again.
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58 of 59 people found the following review helpful
Incomparable April 29, 2005
Format:Paperback
Sometimes A Great Notion is, in my humble opinion, one of the finest pieces of American literature. I read this book when I was 18, 25, 33, 45 and now once again at my half-century mark. With each read the book has taken on more meaning, more clarity, more subtlety--more importance to living itself.

When I heard of Kesey's passing recently I felt a remorse, a sadness that I had never gone out of my way to meet him and look him in the eye and tell him that this one work of his had touched my life in many ways, moreso than almost any other book I've read.

Other reviews here sum up the narrative well, but there is one passage near the end that cuts far into the meat of the novel:

"...there is always a sanctuary more, a door that can never be forced whatever the force; a last inviolable stronghold that cannot be taken, whatever the attack. Your vote can be taken, your name, your innards, even your life. But that last stronghold can only be surrendered--and to surrender it for any reason other than love is to surrender love..."

An important lesson for us all. We can only hope that Ken has found his eternal sanctuary.
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58 of 61 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Like "Cuckoo's Nest", this novel is as big and as expansive as the Pacific Northwest it is set in, where Kesey spins the colorful tale of a ogging family pit by circumstance against big business and the negativity of small town America. Describhed with his usual kaliedoscopic powers of wonderfully flowing detail and color, this is a complex and multi-layered tale, with more than enough ingredients for sustained exploration and interest; passion, betrayal, the intricate inner workings of an interesting family of individuals who love and need each other but at the same time want and need to stretch and grow, to be more than just who they are within the confines of that family.

In a sense this book is a almost a deliberate self-parody; Kesey shows there are many more ways to be a man than through the mere use of what are usually thought of as masculine characteristics. Thus we have a character like Hank, the ultimate bad-ass Stamper counterposed by Leland, the younger half-brother who is intellectually curious, a bit rowdy and uncertain, and who is exploring wht it means to be a "Stamper". This interesting rivalry and opposition between the brothers is used to explore a whole range of issues about what it means to be areal man and a real grown-up, and Kesey understands that in contemporary America the two hardly mean the same thing.

Yet at heart, this is a novel that lovingly but urgently explores the idea of family; what it should be, what it is, and what it should never let itself become. The Stampers beseiged are the family at their best, fighting, working, loving, and struggling together to keep it together and to define their own future and their very own version of the American dream; one they define and create, and expressly not the easy and popular one manufactured and sold politically and economically by big business and by the local townfolk themselves. This, then, is a novel that explores so many levels that it is undoubtedly will be continue to be read and interpreted and reread and reinterpreted again and again over the coming decades. May it well survive the journey, and may it well navigate its course, just as the Stampers do, through a deep understanding, love and appreciation for what it means to be an individual as well as a family member in contemporary American life, learning along the way. Ken Kesey never disappoints, but he is sometimes hard to keep up with as he chuckles his way ahead of us into the stormy rapids of life. Enjoy!

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Most Recent Customer Reviews
the film was better than the book.
I agree with the most critical review. I always finish a book that has been recommended as good literature. Read more
Published 4 months ago by dennis
Not an easy read, but immensely rewarding
This book did not come easy for me - I was struggling exactly up until the middle, trying to keep track of the gist of the story, the various characters, their relations... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Liv Asettson
Forever a Great Story!
I just got through rereading this novel after a span of about 40 years. Enough has been said about it in these posts - it IS a great story, & I see now how much it influenced my... Read more
Published 10 months ago by hook
Too long and maybe too ambitious
I was a little disappointed in this. It's very long and parts of it are written in a stream of conscious style. I ended up skipping over those after awhile. Read more
Published 11 months ago by fy colorado
An American Masterpiece
I had the great good fortune of calling Ken Kesey a life long friend. I had read ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST when I was in college, as part of a reading assignment for a... Read more
Published 13 months ago by James Dalessandro
Kesey Breaks All The Rules
I just read a few pages of Kesey's first book, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, and I'm relieved that it's written in a more relaxed traditional style. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Monty J. Heying
Sometimes masturbatory, always awesome
Reading Sometimes a Great Notion is hard work. The book is six-hundred pages, but sweating out these six-hundred takes twice as long to as any other six-hundred page-r I've come... Read more
Published 15 months ago by JeffPrevails
My favorite fiction
You can read the other reviews to find out what the book is about. Short and sweet--this is my favorite fiction. Read more
Published 17 months ago by PJ Clark
My favorite fiction
My favorite work of fiction ever. Funny and psychedelic yet the plot is very well planned and contrived. Very Tom Robbins-like. I read it once a year.
Published 17 months ago by Stephen Lang
amazing audiobook narration by Stechschulte, Tom. Not sure if I would...
The audiobook for Sometimes a great notion is outstanding. Tom Stechschulte's narration is just awesome. I am almost certain that I wouldn't have been able to read the whole book. Read more
Published 17 months ago by robgoal
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Introduction (From Wikipedia)

Sometimes a Great Notion is Ken Kesey's second novel, published in 1964. While One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) was arguably the more famous of the two novels, many critics consider Sometimes a Great Notion Kesey's magnum opus. The story involves an Oregon family of loggers who cut and procure trees for a local mill in opposition to striking, unionized workers.

Attribution: The information appearing above in this tab is from Wikipedia: Sometimes a Great Notion. Amazon is not affiliated with, and neither endorses, nor is endorsed by Wikipedia or any of the authors who contributed to this article. The Wikipedia content may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: CC BY-SA. Additional or other terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.

Plot (From Wikipedia)

The story centers on the Stamper family, a hard-headed logging clan in the fictional town of Wakonda, Oregon. The union loggers in the town of Wakonda go on strike in demand of the same pay for shorter hours in response to the decreasing need for labor due to the introduction of the chainsaw. The Stamper family, however, owns and operates a company without unions and decides to not only continue work, but to supply the regionally owned mill with all the lumber the laborers would have supplied had the strike not occurred.

This decision, and the surrounding details of the decision, are deeply explored in this multilayered historical background and relationship study—especially in its examination of the following characters: Henry Stamper, the old and half-crazed patriarch whose motto "Never Give A Inch!" has defined the nature of the family and its dynamic with the town; Hank, the oldest son of Henry whose strong will and personality make him a leader but his subtle insecurities and desires threaten the stability of his family; Leland, the younger son of Henry and half brother of Hank, whose constant weaknesses and the nature of his intellect led him away from the family to the East Coast, but whose eccentric behavior and desire for revenge against Hank lead him back to Oregon; and Viv, whose love for her husband Hank fades quickly when she begins to realize her true place in the Stamper household.

The family house itself manifests the physical stubbornness of the Stamper family; as the nearby river widens slowly and causes erosion, all the other houses on the river have either been consumed or wrecked by the waters or moved away from the current, except the Stamper house, which stands on a precarious peninsula struggling to maintain every inch of land with the help of an arsenal of boards, sand bags, cables, and other miscellaneous items brandished by Henry Stamper in his fight against the encroaching river.

Attribution: The information appearing above in this tab is from Wikipedia: Sometimes a Great Notion. Amazon is not affiliated with, and neither endorses, nor is endorsed by Wikipedia or any of the authors who contributed to this article. The Wikipedia content may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: CC BY-SA. Additional or other terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.

Reception (From Wikipedia)

Initial reviews of the book ran to both extremes, but its reputation has aged well. Charles Bowden calls it "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century." It is widely considered among the masterpieces of Western American literature. In 1997, a panel of Northwest writers voted it number one in a list of "12 Essential Northwest Works". One book critic has described it as "what may well be the quintessential Northwest novel".

Attribution: The information appearing above in this tab is from Wikipedia: Sometimes a Great Notion. Amazon is not affiliated with, and neither endorses, nor is endorsed by Wikipedia or any of the authors who contributed to this article. The Wikipedia content may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: CC BY-SA. Additional or other terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.

Film adaptation (From Wikipedia)

The novel was adapted into a 1971 film. The film starred Paul Newman and Henry Fonda and was nominated for two Oscars.

The film has been titled "Never Give A Inch" .

Stage adaptation (From Wikipedia)

A stage adaptation, written and directed by Aaron Posner, premiered in Portland, Oregon at Portland Center Stage on April 4, 2008.

Attribution: The information appearing above in this tab is from Wikipedia: Sometimes a Great Notion. Amazon is not affiliated with, and neither endorses, nor is endorsed by Wikipedia or any of the authors who contributed to this article. The Wikipedia content may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: CC BY-SA. Additional or other terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.

Style (From Wikipedia)

Sometimes a Great Notion is more rooted in realism than Kesey's previous work, the phenomenally successful One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but is also more experimental. It has been compared to William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! in both form and content.

The novel uses the technique of having multiple characters speak sequentially in the first person, with no announcement that the first-person speaker has changed. A first reading can be confusing, but subsequent readings reveal that Kesey always provides a clue, quickly referring to the previously-presumed first character in the third person. This technique allows Kesey to weave an intricate braid of characters who reveal their motives in depth to the reader, but do not communicate well with each other.[citation needed]

Title (From Wikipedia)

Kesey took the title from the song “Goodnight, Irene”, popularized by Leadbelly.

Sometimes I lives in the country

Sometimes I lives in town

Sometimes I haves a great notion

To jump into the river an’ drown

Attribution: The information appearing above in this tab is from Wikipedia: Sometimes a Great Notion. Amazon is not affiliated with, and neither endorses, nor is endorsed by Wikipedia or any of the authors who contributed to this article. The Wikipedia content may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: CC BY-SA. Additional or other terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
pot hangover, been manless, spar tree
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Joe Ben, Hank Stamper, Floyd Evenwrite, Brother Walker, Boney Stokes, Henry Stamper, Wakonda Pacific, Les Gibbons, New York, Real Estate Man, Howie Evans, Willard Eggleston, Big Newton, Leland Stanford, Sea Breeze, Tommy Osterhaust, Wakonda Auga, Captain Marvel, Jonathan Draeger, Mama Olson, Real Estate Hotwire, Biggy Newton, Coos Bay, Jonathan Bailey Draeger, Old Reliable
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