Rating: 
Summary: Kafka, Socrates and the Incredible Shrinking Man
Review: Like many of the reviewers, I was drawn to "Diagnosis" by my absolute enjoyment of the author's "Einstein's Dreams." The latter was a philosophical tone poem or haiku; elegant in its simplicity and highly thought provoking. In fact, it is one of the few books that I spent considerably more time thinking about that I did reading. It read like condensed Calvino with a scientific twist."Diagnosis" is an entirely different animal altogether. Bill Chalmers'world of "maximum information in the minimum time" is all too familiar to many of us who are trying to remain productive in a world in which we are drowning in the undifferentiated babble of information produced with the help of supposed productivity tools (laptop, cell phone, PDA, and who can tell the differences among any of them this week anyway?) Bill's life is a mess, with work, family and health deteriorating around him outside his plane of vision. And as he spirals downward, he is bombarded with useless, crippling information while the one piece of information he craves eludes him. A host of malignantly obfuscating characters lead Bill through his own circles of hell as he recedes farther and farther from the "normal" guy he once was. The reader does have to wade through some deep metaphoric mud at times. The Antyus/Socrates subplot seems to revolve around the theme that society destroys those who ask penetrating questions about its philosophical underpinnings. There are physical metaphors in the effects of the poison used for execution in ancient Athens and Bill's condition, but the links between the subplots could have been less obtuse. This is not a novel for those who seek happy endings or tidy summations. But one of the best things I can ever say about any work of art is that I found it emotionally engaging and intellectually stimulating. "Diagnosis" fit that bill.
Rating:
Summary: Hard to review
Review: I imagine many people will take this wonderful novel as an indictment of the age we live in; driven by technology, some might say devoid of spirit and soul. And I suppose it would be wrong to say it's not. More accurately though, it is an indictment of people who use technology as a crutch to navigate the travails of everyday life, at the expense of interpersonal relationships. It is an indictment of people who believed that have only one course of action, when the fact is, they are too blind to see the other paths they might take. This is an amazing, moving novel, that offers great insight into our collective (flawed) state of mind at the dawn of the 21st century.
Rating:
Summary: An Effective Socratic Query
Review: It's amusing to see so many reviewers harping on the lack of resolution in Lightman's new novel as well as the author's ample use of misspelled e-mails and the Socrates/Anytus sub-plot. "The Diagnosis" is not a conventional novel (i.e. one in which all things culminate in a Aesop-like moral). Nor is Lightman's style meant to sketch a literal picture of our times. The details are there, to be sure, but they are laid out as impressions, not clinical descriptions. Thus, the horribly misspelled e-mails symbolize (a key word here) the rushed and reckless nature of modern communication, the Anytus sub-plot functions to propose questions, not answer them (a successful embodiment of the Socratic method), and the non-resolutions are meant to provoke further thought. Some readers seem to completely by-pass the novel's intention in a frantic search for the information buried in Lightman's novel. In a very real sense, they are committing the same crime as the protagonist himself. The Socrates of Plato's "Republic" rarely supplies answers. Instead, he poses penetrating questions that are meant to arouse further contemplation. Lightman does the same here. His book is one long (but entertaining) Socratic question: "If a man is stripped of all his external points of reference, than what is left?" It is a question we Bill Chalmers of the world would be well served by pondering.
Rating: 
Summary: A waste of my time.
Review: I would not even give it a star if I had the choice. Amazon.com has some splendid books on writing fiction and maintaining a story line. Hint hint. Argh! To think of the trees! -- Anonymous
Rating: 
Summary: The unexamined life is hardly worth living.
Review: I received this book as a Christmas present and thoroughly enjoyed it. If you like Don DeLillo (White Noise), you'll love Lightman's new style. In contrast to the rarefied atmosphere of his highly successful Einstein's Dreams, Lightman's Diagnosis is pulsing with blood, sweat, tears and laughter. Long story short, this is a darkly humorous look at our modern predicament, a view that reminds us of the wisdom of that ancient philosopher, Socrates, who warned us that the unexamined life is hardly worth living. And so it is with the main character of the story, Bill Chalmers, whose desperate need for a proper diagnosis is thwarted by modern forces so common in our lives - office politics, urban inhumanity, suburban paranoia, and at every turn a technology that precludes with ubiquitous urgency any chance of our snatching a single moment for much needed contemplation. Overwhelmed by an environment of cell phones and the complex systems that make our modern lives possible, the main character temporarily loses his mind. By itself, the early scene of his going insane in the Boston subway is well worth the price of admission. The main character's own failings resonate with the failings of the very institutions that are in place, theoretically, to save his sanity - his doctors, his therapist, even man's best friend, his family's pedigree dog, nothing seems to provide much help. Only his young son seems to be reaching out with any real line back to life. By reading to his (by now) crippled father some scenes from the death of Socrates, the son provides the only clue to the source of his father's bizarre deterioration. Yet, despite his son's (unconscious?) efforts to impart some ancient wisdom, Bill Chalmers asymptotically approaches a platonic pinpoint in the backwater of his brain, a sense-less isolation, confinement to a bedroom bedazzled with strange artwork, shadowy images on the walls and floor. Can such a collapse lead to revelation, a look beyond the shadows of our modern cave? Can a paralysis of this sort lead to the self examination necessary for psychological salvation? Read Lightman's Diagnosis of our society and decide for yourself.
Rating:
Summary: bold and rebellious
Review: Sorry, I appreciated this book because Chalmers was resonantly human and insightful into the human psyche. A moral and ethical being, he acquiesed to his position and upward mobility, but internally, he was a resonant human with needs for loved ones in his life, a sense of actuating himself, while still being appreciated by our society. These have become impossible goals: It's either go corporate or go dead for the contemporary "Winston Smith's" of our culture. Thus Chalmers began to deteriorate. It's scary, but totally plausible. All persons are, in fact, unique and watching others with the proper connections get ahead does not enhance. Sorry, but Lightman, a genius, gets many points in morality and ethics for promoting real people.
Rating:
Summary: Diagnosis: Severe Disappointment
Review: It is hard for me to believe that this is the same guy who wrote the beautiful and hypnotic Einstein's Dreams, and even more difficult to imagine that this is a later work. The book reads like the plot of a TV movie, and not a particularly good one at that. Each character is an easy stereotype, and when Mr. Lightman tries to draw even stereotyped characters outside his own milieu he is even weaker. I kept waiting for this sorry job to get better, and it never did. I only finished it out of a sense of disbelief; it was a complete waste of my time.
Rating:
Summary: A good book from my favorite author
Review: Mr. Lightman has created an amazing portrait of modern day life. How many numbers, statistics, details does Bill Chalmers have to deal with on the first two pages of the book alone? If you haven't realized it yet, there is something wonderful in this book that people react to. Bill Chalmers is Martin Dressler in the information age. He is me (you?) on every bad day in the office. He's everyone on a cellphone on the 7:49 am train. Did you ever feel like a 60 watt lightbulb being fed 120 watts of power all day every day? If you've ever wondered about what the consequences of that could be, buy and read this book. I left off the 5th star because of the vagueness of detail that sometimes got in my way. As some have mentioned, sometimes I just wasn't getting the reason for the Greek storyline. I think I do now, but still I'm not completely convinced. And I really still don't understand what it is Plymouth (Bill's company) does. And well, yes, frankly, it's a bit too much like American Beauty. Granted, that doesn't mean this is less of a work on its own merits, but that is something off with regard to uniqueness. Buy this book, and buy Einstein's Dreams, too.
Rating:
Summary: The Dialectics of Knowing
Review: This is a very important book. When 2100 comes along and people want to know what the turn of the century was like, this is the book that people will recommend. This book is at once funny, insightful and deeply moving. While a wonderful novel, it is essentailly a meditation on our obsession with knowing and the limits of knowing. While the characters are bombarded with information and information devices what is most important escapes them all. To underscore the tension between knowing and not knowing is the story of Anytus the Athenian general who desperately wants to kill Socrates, and succeeds. Socrates whose claim to wisdom was that he knew he did not know,was too dangerous to the youth of Athens and had to be destroyed. Anytus and his son were estranged. The characters in the main story are as well, yet they clumsily seem to love each other. I'm not sure they know this either. This book will make you think and think again.
Rating:
Summary: Poor
Review: The set-up was wonderful but there was no resolution whatsoever. Socrates death excerpts? What was the point? How about some resolution with the wife's 'affair', the foreshadowing with the company and its work ethic was never resolved, nor was there any depth with the characters. It has been a long time since I was so dissapointed in a book.
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