Rating: 
Summary: Maybe, Maybe Not
Review: This is the kind of book that a person who is intelligent but uneducated in philosophy would pick up, read, and be excited and terribly enlightened by. This apparently was the state of many of the "hippies" who read this book when it came out. But for someone who has read Aristotle and Plato and the myriad of others, especially the Greeks, this book can seem almost ridiculously off-center in its generalizations. Whether it is or not, that is for the reader to decide, I suppose.The narrator is at first likeable, but as the book moves on and his madness becomes evident, you see his character become despicable, self-absorbed, mean, closed-minded, and, well, a hypocrite in a number of ways. This change may be a large part of the appeal of this book as a sort of psychological novel, though I am still not sure whether that is what Pirsig intended it to be. Despite the disgust and boredom I sometimes felt while reading, the book has a lot of good things to say about living and the self. Most importantly, if you pay enough attention it will definitely get you thinking. Overall, a controversial book, but worth reading if only for the thought and controversy it will provoke within your own mind.
Rating: 
Summary: Buried treasure
Review: Read this book. Talk about it. Share it with your friends. This book is more important than one thinks at first glance. I have read it 5 times over the past 25 years, first as a teenager thinking it was about motorcycles, next as a Philosophy major at Harvard, and each time I have gotten something new out of it. It is more than a travel adventure. It is more than a father/son reconciliation story. It is more than an autobiographical odyssey of psychological redemption. It is even more than an "inquiry into values." This book reveals the greatest crime perpetrated against intellectual history. While Pirsig is concerned with a synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, he points us to the violence done by Plato in his attack on the Sophists. Until Plato, Philosophy was a part of the common life. Sophists wandered the Greek world offering instruction (for pay) in rhetoric and Philosophy, and this was deemed the normal course of life. Even Plato's revered Socrates conducted his discourses in the marketplace, the agora. The aristocratic and elitist Plato's crime (in my view) was to whisk philosophical discussion away from the agora and put it in the acadamy, where it has remained gathering dust for 25 centuries. His Theory of Forms tells us that few, if any other than himself, can see things as they "really are." The Republic tells us that only the philosopher-king (Plato himself being the leading candidate) is fit to rule. If all of Philosophy is a "response to Plato" as A.N. Whitehead put it, then we are debating with a traitor to humanity. Nothing is more relevant than a synthesis of the Philosophical and the Practical ways of being, as well as Eastern and Western ways of thinking. I have devoted my life to dragging the philosophical debate back from the academy into the agora where it belongs and where it can be of the greatest good to the greatest number of people. Reading and sharing this book with friends is a wonderful way to begin that pilgrimage yourself. I just wish someone would make a film of it. Can't you just see William Hurt in the lead?
Rating: 
Summary: Let Go. Please !!!
Review: This is an account of one man's slow and painful descent into madness. The descent is caused by compulsive thinking, with an obsessive need to find "The Answer" and to take on the established order. The object of the obsession is hardly relevant. The greatest value of this book is as a cautionary tale against over-thinking. The word "Zen" does not belong in the title of this book. Zen is something to be practiced and lived, and there isn't the slightest hint that Pirsig is in tune with this concept.
Rating:
Summary: One of the top ten books of the last 20 years
Review: This book is the ultimate travelogue. It takes the reader on many different journeys: a motorcyle ride from the midwest to the Pacific coast, a philosophical ride from ancient Greece to modern America, a relationship ride between father and son, and a long slow descent into insanity. All woven together in one story. I have read this book at least ten times, each time starting out with a different journey in mind. I read it the first time because it covered much of the country I came from and I frankly skipped much of the philosophy. I then read it again with the philosophy riding shotgun. I think you can see where I am going here. Each time reading it I have had a different set of values and qualities that I was looking at. (I have even read it to see if I could determine what type of motorcycle was used for the journey.) As I grow older, and my perspective changes from know-it-all youth to confused parent and adult, each time I read this book (or even a section) I get something different out of it
Rating:
Summary: A 20th Century Masterpiece
Review: This book changed my life. I've read it several times, and each time I get something new out of it. It is the defining book of the 20th century. Pirsig redefines what Quality means in our culture. You will never look at material objects in the same way again, in fact you will be forced to reevaluate the way you live. His narrator gets inside your head and sets up shop there. His narrative is intriguing, thought-provoking, emotionally shattering, and often times so complex you will find yourself re-reading passages to make sure you understood them correctly. Told as much as a mystery, as an adventure tale and a dissertation on how we live with technology; with all it's intellectual depth and probing of ancient Greek philosophers, it's remarkably easy to read, clearly written from the point of view of the layman. This book should be a mandatory read for every high school student. The 25th anniversary hardback edition is beautiful as well, and features a new introduciton by author, Robert Pirsig. Take the time to read this masterpiece. You'll thank yourself, over and over.
Rating: 
Summary: I liked it
Review: This book is widely read among people involved with higher education. When you read the book, it becomes obvious why. Although it doesn't teach much about motorcycles, it doesn't give us a general idea of how we could live our life. As near as I am able to determine it has three basic plots. The first and most usual is a father and a son going on a motorcycle trip through the northwestern states. They ride the motorcycle through the country on a long trip back to their old home and anywhere else they feel like visiting. Second is the father trying to find a piece of his personality that he lost as a ward of the state. His previous self had been a collage Rhetoric teacher at some school in Montana. He lost it in a very interesting way. The third and most time and space consuming plot isn't really a plot but more like a discourse on modern life. Should you venture to read this book don't do it for the first plot or the second plot. They take up only a very small portion of the book, like say, two paragraphs every chapter. The big reason to read it would be for the ideas and thoughts of an insane or maybe genius collage professor trying to get the world to make sense to himself. If you're looking for action look somewhere else. The reason I liked this book had to do with the ideas. In every chapter he would say something that would make sense and be worth writing a book about in and of itself. He did; however, have one great though that cost him a personality. Now the main idea in as little space as I can manage and still have it make sense.( To me at least) It is generally believed that the world is made up of two things; subjects and objects. Objects being physical things and subjects being thoughts or Ideas. If we refine this further we get the romantic and the classical , the hip and the square, the poet and the scientist, radical and conservative, democrat and Republican. One side based on hard facts and the other on ideas and feelings. Each side has its good parts and nether one is necessarily bad. It comes to me now that before the professor lost his personality he was one and afterwards he was the other. What he came up with was a third party. He called it quality. It is some kind of force or reaction that creates the subjects and objects. It defines what they are. To understand this we must first try and define exactly what Quality is.
Quality is what makes 007 better than Spongebob Squarepants (which it is by the way). Quality is why we like to eat beef instead of beans. But what is it? We like different things for different reasons. Why is a salty fry better than a salty soup? If the Quality of a fry goes up depending on how much salt is on it does that mean that if you add salt to Cheerios they will have greater Quality?" SOOO, Quality is different depending on what the object is. Quality is not an object or a subject, it is something else entirely. If you think about it (for a while) you can see there is some logic to it. If nothing had quality we wouldn't care what we watched on TV because all shows would be the same, none would be better than another or worse than another. You wouldn't care what food you ate as long as it gave you nutrients, we would be Borg. There would be no bad because there would be no good. And if so there could be no God. 2 Nephi 2:13 If none of this make sense then try reading it again after you read the book. I can attach several interpretations to what exactly this Quality could be. Among them are free agency, the Holy Ghost, a conscious, or maybe even God. Really, it is judgement or the ability to judge. Which is comes closest to Agency I think. It kind of throws a whole new perspective on why we needed free Agency and why we couldn't live in the garden of Eden. The book give numerous examples as to how this third party can apply to every part of our life from living with technology to collage life. Between the lines of this Trinity of Object-Quality-Subject are hundreds of small pieces of other brain-blowing wisdom. He covers environmentalism, city v country living, motorcycles v car travel, and many others subjects. Most of these are deep enough that it is best to take a break so you can think about them for a while to get the full potential of the book. Going back to the Quality of the book(pardon the pun); the writing style was a little hard to follow and it will never be a great literary masterpiece in that effect. He uses abundant allusions to Classical Greek philosophers namely Plato's Discourse on Phaedrus( which is what the professor calls his lost identity) and a working knowledge of them would be useful. I say again, do not read this for action, story line, or motorcycles. It has very little in regard to these areas and if I knew anything about Zen I guess it would probably have little to do with that either. He also uses words that mean the same thing unless you define them the way he tells you to. It really has a substantial mucilaginous vocabulary throughout the work. On a final note this book is a really good one if you like that kind of thing. It has been studied by many collages including BYU. It is great if you know the Greek Ideas but is really not a "fun read" in the normal sense. You have to think about it and it may not be relaxing the way most books are supposed to be. You shouldn't read it all at once or even very much of it at a time. It is full of Ideas not all of which are necessarily true. Remember to put every thing you choose to believe to a prayerful test. In my opinion he had something worth thinking about under all that rhetoric as do most philosophers. Read the book, but only with the right state of mind and take your time.
Rating:
Summary: Slow as molasses
Review: Yes, the book had interesting ideas. But the pacing was geriatric. Like watching paint dry. If it had been edited down to half it's size it would have been readable.
Rating:
Summary: Bridging the gap
Review: Pirsig takes us on a literary chautauqua that dives into the split between romanticism and clasicism, and speaks magnitudes about the philosiphies and sciences of Eastern and Western Cultures. The book has seized rave reviews across the globe, and held best-seller status for record amounts of time. One wonders, what could possibly be in this book that has made it so accredited for such a long time? The answer is that the book takes the reader on a journey that was never supposed to happen. Pirsig elucidates, in four hundred pages, about the conflicts with his son, and himself. Phaedrus, Pirsig's former personality, is represented as a ghost from Pirsig's past. Phaedrus takes the reader through Greek logic, Eastern culture, and Buddhist beliefs. The book gives a good explanation of the differences in Eastern and Western cultures, and how the splitting of the two has caused problems throughout the world.
Coming from a background of the dry sciences, my reading of classical literature is hardly amazing. These two topics do not go together and rarely have anything to bridge the gap. This book does that job wonderfully. For the first time, I understood literature of this complexity, because it deals with the sciences and the arts; it kept me interested and also made me relate my life to the characters lives.
So, what do I suggest? If you have the time, the patience, and an open mind, this book will do you wonders and will stick with you for years to come.
Rating:
Summary: Resonance Required for Highest-Quality Experience
Review: "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is an entire experience in philosophy and spirituality condensed into what I found to be a very thought-provoking anti-novel. It has three main "streams" of thought: the story of the motorcycle-riding narrator and his son, the story of Phaedrus, and the Chautauqua that is the narrator's way of explaining Phaedrus' philosophy. Though the first two chapters of the narrator's musings are slow to bring the reader into the plot, intriguing mystery elements are revealed by the end of Chapter 3. By this time, the reader should know that Phaedrus spent his whole life searching for a ghost, found the ghost, "thrashed it good," and became one himself. However, the nameless narrator cannot tell Phaedrus' story without also giving the reader a crash-course in history, philosophy, and of course, motorcycle maintenance (through the Chautauqua, of course). I now warn those who cannot bear long lectures about dead historical figures, slippery concepts or technical minutiae to leave this book alone. Part I of the book is set chiefly in the Dakotas. During this part, the Chautauqua mostly discusses the classical-romantic split in people's thinking. What makes Robert M. Pirsig's discussions unique is how he deftly brings Zen concepts into the reader's understanding of the split. Part II begins with the narrator's arrival in Montana. It is the reader's first real encounter with Phaedrus (an unforgettable, though hardly endearing, character) and the first introduction to the "ghost" that he so passionately pursued. (The ghost's name: REASON. One of its popular haunts: SCIENTIFIC METHOD.) Part III takes place during and right after the narrator and his son's hike up a mountain. The chapters in this section are almost entirely devoted to the Chautauqua. The discussion of the ghost of Reason is dropped and a full, in-depth explanation of something outside Reason, Quality, is taken up. Pirsig takes great pains to say how Quality determines our values, creates our mythos and touches our hearts. Those who like taking detours when an interesting topic distracts them will love this part. Those who don't care for such detours and want to get on with the story will find this part long-winded and over-written. (This is their second warning!) Part IV continues and ends Phaedrus' story as the narrator and his son go through Oregon and California. In the Chautauqua, Quality is joined by Reason once more. The reader finds out how Phaedrus travelled to the University of Chicago, took his philosophical inquiry to its logical end, and finally became a "ghost" himself. His conclusions about what is Real, about what is True, about what is Beautiful, and about what is Best, can prove liberating to anyone who has been independently wondering about them. The ending also contains an interesting twist in the story of the narrator and his son. I can find connections between the ideas in this novel and those in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the parables of Kahlil Gibran, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, the books of the Bible, and other great spiritual or philosophical literature that generations have read and shared. (Pirsig even explains the why and how of this phenomenon in the Chautauqua.) To best enjoy this story, the reader must relate to it--or resonate to it.
Rating:
Summary: Flawed by Foolishness
Review: This otherwise excellent book is flawed by several errors in basic logic. For example, early in the book, the main character claims that before Newton created a law of gravity, gravity did not exist. For the record, the human conception of the way the universe works and the actual mechanics of the universe are too very different things. Anyone who believes that physics is a human construction is welcome to walk out my bedroom window.
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