Sailor Song

by Ken Kesey

Overview

This epic tale of the north is a vibrant moral fable for our time. Set in the near future in the fishing village of Kuinak, Alaska, a remnant outpost of the American frontier not yet completely overcome by environmental havoc and mad-dog development, Sailor Song is a wild, rollicking novel, a dark and cosmic romp. The town and its denizens—colorful refugees from the Lower Forty-Eight and DEAPs (Descendants of Early Aboriginal Peoples)—are seduced and besieged by a Hollywood crew, come to film the classic children's book The Sea Lion. The ensuing turf war escalates into a struggle for the soul of the town as the novel spins and swirls toward a harrowing climax. Writing with a spectacular range of language and style, Kesey has given us a unique and powerful novel about America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140139976
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/01/1993
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	544
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

Editorial Reviews

After 25 years, a new novel from Kesey—a brilliant, funny, heartening tale of the power of love to stomp out evil in the last decent town on earth—proves that the heroic old Trickster can still pitch a fastball. Just after the turn of the millennium, Isaak Sallas, a.k.a "the Bakatcha Bandit," a legendary environmental warrior from the "Nasty Nineties," wakes up in his antique trailer to confront a couple of unwelcome omens from the end of the world. The most deadly sign is the silvery albino Nick Levertov, the bad-seed son of Alice ("the Angry Aleut"), battering the hell out of blowzy Louise Loop. The next day, watching a huge silver movie-company yacht sail into the harbor with Levertov aboard, Sallas realizes that Levertov has come back to Kuinak, Alaska, to settle a score of grievances. A couple of decades before, Sallas, once a CIA flier who won the Navy Cross, had to bear the death of his baby daughter—a death caused by his own exposure to pesticides. The tragedy transformed him absolutely. The next day, he used his pesticide plane to drop a fragrant load on an upper-middle-class crowd at a California county fair: right "Bakatcha." His fire had burned out long since, he now thinks. He'd hoped to live in peaceful obscurity in this last unpolluted backwater, fishing with the jolly Brit skipper Carmody and his Rasta sidekick Greer. Now, however, with Levertov buying up and corrupting the town with wads of movie money and piles of a designer drug called "Scoot," Sallas discovers that he has the stuff—the love and faith—to drive evil out of town: "Dolls were being set up, and being knocked down. The situation was in progress, and in dedicated lock; itcouldn't be blinked and it couldn't be ducked." A wonderful tale for the times, proving Kesey is "Bakacha" after all these years.

Kirkus Reviews