"I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor." It is my favorite line from the novel, and could I have written 1000 words on that alone I would have.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ken Kesey: two authors separated by a great many things including their practicing time periods and political ideologies, nevertheless both centered their defining works of fiction around the folly of American culture and society, Fitzgerald during the jazz age and Kesey during the political movements of the 1960s.

Violence is pervasive in our media. It is glorified in almost all forms of popular culture entertainment, from television shows, movies, novels, and even in music. The rise of comic-book inspired cinema has seen violence portrayed even more in our film industry, adapting a medium in which fists, not words, solving problems are typically the order of the day.