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Greatbookdeals have to have the worst communications and shipping on planet earth. The book is good, however, I would not recommend ever buying any products from the company I purchased this book from- (greatbookdeals). This is by far the worst place I have ever made a purchase from and I am saying this in a nice way. Please save yourself a headache and buy from anyone else. Greatbookdeals get well I don't have enough thumbs on my hands to give them a thumbs down.Would not recommend greatbookdeals to anyone.
and 1994, and 2009---Okay, so I only read it cover-to-cover once, in '74, when I didn't know any better and I thought it was deep. Yadda, yadda. It's also self-indulgent, ego-ridden, rambling, and completely dry. If Pirsig really did know anything about Zen he would have burned this book once he'd typed the dedication page. It's got something to do with "Quality." That's all I could glean from it.
It's said that 147 publishers passed on this before it became a best seller, which should inspire confidence that the waste of enough time will ultimately result in something, kind of like the billion monkeys who type the Bible at random.Pirsig admits this book has NOTHING to do with Zen and NOTHING MUCH to do with motorcycles. In ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE he's trying to write objectively about what are subjective experiences. This is probably the best selling philosophy book ever, but I'm still trying to figure out what Pirsig's "philosophy" is. Kids.
Pirsig's story revolves around a motorcycle trip taken with his son. The problem with Pirsig's approach is that he's an objectivist first and a subjectivist second. I read this book in 1974 and 1980. This was the first "Zen and the Art of" book, and its inexplicable popularity is reflected in the fact that seven billion subsequent books hijacked the title. Why then, was this coma-inducing pile of typing so successful.
What tripe. During the trip he ignores the boy utterly (except to emotionally abuse him), and spends 99% of his time in flatulent speculations on the nature of existence. He's pathologically critical of others and addicted to self-praise and superficial examination of his own problems. I can remember only one moment of any lyric beauty, when Pirsig describes the scent of honeysuckle. Truth be told, the title is the most memorable thing about this book.What's wrong with ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE. Firstly, it represented the high-water mark of, and epitomized, the "Me Decade" that gave birth to it. The importance of Quality in our lives is illustrated by this book, which has none.
Secondly, it was just dull enough and filled with enough funny names and five dollar words to have readers believing it was really good and they were really dense for not getting it. About 6,999,999,998 of those subsequent books are better, and should trace their lineage to Eugen Herrigel's ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY which is a great book, and which inspired Pirsig's title. Well, it's a long, long boring read. Trying to make it dance, he ends up with something that clanks when it walks heavy-footed across your frontal lobe. It remains a biggie because it lives off its reputation as a "classic." What this all boils down to is that Pirsig made millions convincing people that they were stupid and that he was smart.
No need for that. Since we were well before a simple Wikipedia search, it would be years before I would hear most of their names again. I also owned a motorcycle and had completed an active duty tour in the military. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is still every bit the masterpiece it was back in 1974. Certainly much has been written over the past four decades attempting to define exactly what Pirsig was trying to tell us. It was my third reading of this great book.My second reading came in 1992, I was 28. I had long since forgotten why I came to that conclusion until I relived my young experience on page 176 just a few days ago.
In those days I was brash, arrogant, and full of gumption, as Pirsig would call it. I knew a lot more about philosophy and theology and engineering then I did my first time through. I first read this masterpiece of fiction when I was fifteen, I remember clearly it was 1980 and I spent days in my room trying to understand the big words and attempting to figure out all the characters Pirsig would reference, Kant, Hume, Poincare, and the ancient Greeks. a lot of sense. At that point I knew it had nothing to do with Zen and even less to do with motorcycle maintenance, but Pirsig has always told us that up front.Fast forward sixteen years.a family, a company, a new career, a fresh read. But then what is it about - if it's not about Zen or art of motorcycle maintenance. Experience is the life changer, not thoughts or deeds. It must be experienced.
What I do remember very clearly is that when I emerged from my room I knew I was going to college to become a Mechanical Engineer. Read the book, Pirsig will tell you. I was working as a systems engineer for the DoD and was in school working on my second Master's degree. The book still made sense. No matter what you may hear, no matter what you may think, this book defines for us that which can never be expressed through words and rational thought alone. Experience this book and understand why.
I believe it was revolutionary at the time, but now if I wanted to find out more about Asian philosophy, I'd go right to the source (and have, see Masao Abe's Zen and Western Thought).What I did find interesting in the story was the narrator's portrayal of how he remembers what he was like before he had a nervous breakdown and received shock treatments, as opposed to how he is now. I may not quite be well versed enough in classic Greek dialogs to fully "get" this, although it is considered a classic by millions of readers. I understand and appreciate that the author was trying to find a way to synthesize his own thoughts about Eastern philosophy with his classical Western training, but I found it sort of boring and confusing. He attempts to reconcile his emerging original personality with his new one in a way that parallels his integration of Eastern and Western thought.I wish there had been more focus on how the re-emergence of the original personality was going to affect his family relationships. Would he go back to his obsession with philosophical questions to the exclusion of his family, or would he now be able to find a better balance.A final thought is a quote I heard recently to the effect that the more a man considers his work to be revolutionary and important to the world, the more likely he is to have a nervous breakdown, which seems to be what happened here.
I read three hundred pages of the four hundred and thirty or so between the front and back cover. This book is neither about zen nor philosophy. The author inflicts his issues upon the reader without a sense of reason, though he attempts to explain reason over and over and over. There may not be a direct connection, but both narrators seem to whine a lot. I put this book out in the trash. At least in Prozac Nation we know the narrator is a self-indulgent nymphomaniac drug abuser. There is only one other book I can recall so vehemently closing for good and that was Prozac Nation. It's a whole bunch of whining about some prettied up existential crisis the narrator suffers.
I understand this book is philosophical in nature, and my review may come off as unlearned and ignorant. I am neither, as I have had academic exposure to the material before picking up Zen and the blah blah blah. I thought for a second, around page one hundred-fifty or so, he might be on his way to eastern philosophy on the Gita and doing one's duty for its own sake but he lost me again with more whining. If I want someone's existential crisis foisted upon me, I'll settle for my own.
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