Rating: 
Summary: The best book ever
Review: The book explores your imagination and makes you think for hours what the true meaning of the book is.If you are busy this is a good book for you because it is short but still meaningful.I really love this book.You could read it over and over but never have the same thoughts about it.I would recomend this book to anyone.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book...but not a "must read"
Review: This book, my manager recommended me to read and he did not even told me the content and moral of the story. He just told me that its a one of the bestselling book in the world. When i started to read, first i found it interesting, but after 2nd chapter I started loosing my interest in the story. I really have no clue why it happened. May be my expctations were bit high, may be my perspective is little different. I would not say that this is the book one must buy and keep it for the lifetime. There are number of books available which convey similar message in a very good way.
Rating: 
Summary: In fairness, a comprehensive negative review
Review: It appears that most reviewers of this book read it in their youths at a time when their identities were still forming and when they were in craving inspiration and hope to aid their lackluster adolescent existences (keep in mind that adolescence does not necessarily end with the teenage years for oh so many people, as evidenced by some of the reviews). As with most identity-creating experiences most of these individuals are apparently loathe to let go of thier superficial first impressions of this book and in fact have only reinforced its significance with additional readings. One reviewer is so invested in this book's contribution to their selfness they have proudly proclaimed to have read it "over 300 times". Is there any better example of how addiction to that which is comfortable eliminates opportunity for exposure to new ideas (I'm thinking of people who spend their lives reading only the bible). How can anyone get anything out of something when it is virtually the only thing they read. Aren't they curious about what else is out there? Apparently not, and so much the pity. It need not be surprising then that most Amazon.com reviewers of this book have done so long, long after forming their emotionally-fortified opinions of the book so that thier reviews are not really reviews at all, but rather emotional defenses of themselves as those whose very identities were in part formed by this short work. As a result those positive reviews tend to be long and detailed while the negative reviews - obviously written by people didn't get much out the book - tend to be short and lacking any significant detail making them very easy for dismissal by the "loyalists". I on the other hand, at the age of thirty-five, have only just read the book for the very first time. Yes, I admit it is a bit of a surpise. As rediculously simplistic a message that this book contains, barely disguised as serious literature, it is a surprised that my high school didn't assign it as most school readings tended to have such two-dimensional messages (and also tended to swear the student off reading anything for a short time immediately following completion). I, on the other hand, although having obviously heard about the book for years, never crossed paths with a copy for the forty-odd minutes required to snack on its highly-regarded psycho-wisdom. So I came to it as a fully-formed functioning adult, fresh and anew, and this review is therefore in my opinion a more honest appraisal than most that you will read here. My review itself is short: This book would appear to appeal to the same mass of people who religiously watch Oprah and listen to AM radio for clues on how to better live their lives. It is indeed self-help drivel, perhaps the first example of the avalance of so-called inspirational excrement that rolled off the presses in the 1970s and 80s. I'll allow that Richard Bach may have been the first writer to frame the message of "be all that you can be regardless of the obsticles" into an allegorical (read: thinly disguised) format, but that would only excuse the throngs of people who gravitated towards this book when it was first published during the naive, self-indulgent, spiritually-seeking 70s. It explains nothing about the masses who still seem to derive live-altering inspiration from its simplistic story. I don't claim to have an explantation for that. All I am certain of is this: it only takes a quick chanel surf through daytime television - with the popular surplus of JerrySpringerRickiLakeSallyJesseJennyJones et al, alongside the mind-numbing idiocy of the ever-popular soap-opera genre - to understand that there is indeed a very wide audience for this type of simplistic, non-threatening, non-challenging, non-talented, non story. It is harmless, that is true, but it is hardly a contribution to the condition of man. It may appeal to individuals from the inside of a soul-searching crises, but it is also sorely lacking in substance, meaning, and soul. There is much better enriching material available to read. Of those to whom this book has meant so much I can only say: enjoy your lives. But for heaven's sake read some other stuff as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't read it
Review: Says all that is obvious, a guide book for idiots. Renews nothing. A total waste of time (not much but still a waste).
Rating:
Summary: A short, sweet, and uplifting book.
Review: I was first introduced to Jonathan Livingston Seagull by one of my friends in high school. Since then I have read it many times and each time I have read it it offers new insights. It is a book that is appropriate for everyone, and I am a believer that everyone will find something to take away from this wonderful book that will apply to his or her life. For all of you that have ever dreamed of flying, it's a must-have book!
Rating:
Summary: jonathan livingston seagull
Review: this is a book I treasure.It's inspirational message meant very much to me when I neede it the most.Jonathan's constant search for a higher plain told me anyone can do anything if they want it badly enough.I love to fly and always think of him when I do.
Rating:
Summary: More than just "a story"
Review: This book is about a seagull's struggle to learn more in life than just how to survive. Hey, that's great! Of course, stories like this generally go beyond the literal meaning. And that's what ol' Jonathan does for us. This is a very short, yet surprisingly inspirational and thought-provoking story. I really recommend reading this because, for one thing, it's not even that long. In fact, it even comes complete with some dinky photographs of real seagulls! Uh... not every exciting. The book is a little perplexing in some areas, but the overall message is well worth the read. -- A simple, yet amazingly deep book.
Rating: 
Summary: easy book report material
Review: The only true law is that which leads to freedom
-Jonathan Livingston Seagull Flashback: Sixth Grade. Miss Bock's class. Former nun. Pretty strict but very nice. One day when it was a little loud as we changed classes in our inner city school, she yelled at us; "At East orange high School they may all be shooting heroin in the bathroom but at least it's quite in the hallways!" Our assignment--read a book and build a diorama. You remember dioramas don't you? You take a shoe box, some construction paper & some glue and you build a little scene inside of the box. Let's put it this way, I'm firmly convinced that my wife only wanted to have kids so that she could one day build dioramas with them. I, on the other hand, had no interest then, nor any now, in such projects. Racing through my fevered eleven year old's brain went various schemes and dodges to get out from under this burden. Sadly I did not have the kind of parents who were embarrassed by having me turn in woefully inadequate projects. Remember when your Cub Scout troop did Pinewood Derby and there were always those kids whose Dads had clearly built their car? In our troop we actually had two kids whose dads were Shop Teachers. The Derby cars they brought in could have been sold in stores. Meanwhile, my Father told me it would be a good learning experience if I built my own. The predictable result was that I produced this misshapen, day-glo green, bricklike car with the wheels accidentally glued into immobility. Suffice it to say, I was no challenge to the shop brats, but I did learn something: cheaters win. Absent any illicit parental assistance and devoid of the requisite personal motivation, I needed a really easy book and an extremely basic diorama scene. Thank you Richard Bach! I read mega-bestselling Jonathan Livingston Seagull--all of 127 pages with copious numbers of photographs. Then I took some blue construction paper and glued it into the bottom of the box, cut out the picture of a seagull from the cover of the book and glued it onto the blue background. Voila! Five minutes, project done. As you might intuit, Miss Bock was significantly less impressed by my ingenuity than I was. As I recall she took inordinate and sadistic pleasure in comparing my box to Mark Caldwell's Call of the Wild action scene, which included trees, snow, a moving dog and a little view portal like a binocular lens through which you viewed the scene. Returning to this book now, I feel compelled to defend my vision. The story of the book is almost ridiculously simple. A young seagull wants to learn to fly better. The elders of his flock inform him in no uncertain terms that a seagull only needs to fly well enough to feed himself, that flying is not the point of being a seagull. But Jonathan rebels against the proscribed ambitions of the other gulls; he yearns to explore the boundaries of flight. As he continues to test these limits, the Flock expels him, but eventually a group of younger gulls join him in his quest and together they transcend their seagullness. The message of the book is perhaps best expressed in the epigraph above and in a conversation between Jonathan and Elder Chiang: "Chiang, this world isn't heaven at all, is it?" The Elder smiled in the moonlight. "You are learning again, Jonathan Seagull," he said. "Well what happens from here? Where are we going? Is there no such place as heaven?" "No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being
perfect. This dual message about freedom and the pursuit of perfection is simple but classic. In his own way, Jonathan fits easily within the mainstream of American Literature with heroes like Huck Finn (see Orrin's review), RP McMurphy (see Orrin's review), Cool Hand Luke and the rest. His quest to escape the limits accepted by the Flock is the quintessential quest of Western Man. And what image expresses Bach's allegorical notion better than a solitary seagull soaring? In retrospect, I think I deserved an A. This book is not particularly profound. It is sufficiently ambiguous that different readers will focus on different aspects of the story and take away different messages. But there is something undeniably compelling about Bach's fundamental faith in the individual. It is an especially appropriate book for teens and even adolescents, but adults looking to kill an hour will enjoy it too. Heck, if you and your kid read it, you can build a diorama together afterwards. GRADE: B
Rating:
Summary: Shaped my life
Review: I related so powerfully to this book that I have allowed Richard Bach's words to shape my life. I believe strongly in the ideas that he proposes in this simple, short story -- that forging your own path is always the best option. I have done so in Jonathon Livingston style, serving as a woman in the nearly all male U.S. military branch, the Marines; skydiving, rock climbing, learning aerobatics in a Cessna, attending undergraduate college in Japan and now, attending graduate school in Egypt. The second message of Bach's book is not just to forge your own path, but to encourage others to do the same -- to choose their own paths and to inspire them to their own individual greatness. I try whenever and wherever I see possible to do so.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull lives!
Rating:
Summary: It's lost on me!
Review: I have never really understood the appeal that this little book has had for its thousands of fans. I find the writing simplistic to the point of irritation, and the subject matter banal. However, having said that, my husband adores it and would give it 5 stars. As I said, it's lost on me!
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