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Summary: This book changed my life.
Review: Pirsig takes such an amazing approach to this book. He encompasses everything in our modern world. How and why everything we have created exists as it does is explained in this book. The night after I finished it the whole thing came into view and I understood our reality in a new way. QUALITY has become a word with more meaning than I could have ever imagined, and it has become such a powerful word that I cannot even really believe it, but Pirsig lays it all out for all of us to see. READ THIS AMZING BOOK!
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Summary: A must read..
Review: Had heard abt this book, back in college..somehow slipped my thought for a while. Bumped into this on the shelfs of B&N, picked it up without a second thought...
The way the author has dealt with some fundamental aspects of life, its very insightful...definitely not a philosophical take on life..but the mundane things that we see and do in our lifes are dealt with in amazing clarity. Did it change my life? hard to say, but i did bookmark a lot of pages..for future reference. A must read, and definitely worth a re-read.
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Summary: like nietzsche said
Review: the story of one man's journey to the origins of modern occidental thought, pirsig attempts to diagnose modern man's vapid condition and find a cure. zen and the art... is the tale of phaedrus, "the wolf," who favors intuition before reason, concluding the foundation of all thought is emotion, the primary reality. the problem is, so few today recognize the importance and value of emotions. having deified reason and demonized passion, individuals have lost any authentic zest for life; they are mere sheep. simply adjust the definition of "what is good?" and recognize that which is good cannot be rigidly defined rationally by some shepherd--i.e. jesus--who knows best, but rather must be intuited and expressed naturally--like a wolf--beyond the bounds of what the shepherd deems safe. the wolf is liberated, living dangerously, free to wander in solitude wherever, slave to none. pirsig has a real eye for beauty and an almost-hemingway skill with words. the book is an excellent read, but the author is not as revolutionary as he makes himself out to be: his epiphany is shared by many, especially by nietzsche and the existentialists. another re-valuation of values, updated.
Rating: 
Summary: Not life changing- but a very good read
Review: After stubbornly resisting this book for 25 years because of the silly pop culture that surrounds it, I finally broke down and read it last week. No coffee shop, no backpack in the student union - just me and the book in the suburbs. It was good - very good. Did it change my life? No, absolutely not. For a better search on 'what it all means' read Gregg Easterbrook's Beside Still Waters ,and for the fascination with our day to day lives, I prefer the first two Nicholson Baker novels. Nevertheless, I still highly recommend this book. The interspersion of the trip with Pirsig's study of values is quite well done. The Greek philosophy covered and subsequent personal interpretation more than makes up for some of the hippie stuff didn't age all that well. Another plus was the trip itself, which is much better than just about any road book before or since. While my good - but not life altering -review certainly heaps more praise than the one star ones found here, it appears such middle ground is a minority position in these parts. Still, I'll stick with 3.5 stars. Once I waded through the hype and cult like following, I am glad I finally read this modern classic.
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Summary: Inquiry, not Fiction
Review: A number of the readers who ranked this book poorly seemed to think they had read a novel, though the author says immediately that "it must be regarded in its essence as fact." The narrator, Pirsig, is a man in early middle age, once a teacher of rhetoric and technical writing at Montana State in Bozeman. While there he became interested in the philosophical pursuit of an objective standard of quality or value (a larger form of the discipline of aethetics); this became an obsession when he entered graduate school at the University of Chicago, and the narrator eventually suffered a severe nevous breakdown. In a mental asylum he received 28 shock treatments over two years, destroying much of his memory. At the time of the motorcycle "chatauqua" that frames this book he has rebuilt his life, working as a a technical writer. He has remarried, fathered two children and come to think of himself as a wholely different person. He calls his earlier self "Phaedrus," (the wolf) somewhat ironically after a character in a Socratic dialogue. The trip that reunites him with places and people not seen in years allows Pirsig a good deal of time to meditate on Phaedrus, to try to piece together his former life and how he careened toward insanity. Early in the book is an intimation, that his 11-year son, riding pillion on the cycle during the entire trip, is showing early signs of mental illness. This does not make him easier on the boy; he is instead surprsingly strict, bossy, even competitive, which makes him a vivid if often diasagreeable first-person narrator. (Chris Pirsig did suffer a breakdown, and lived only till about 20; he was still alive when ZAMM was published, however.) I go into this at length because many of these reviews seem to ignore the fact that there is a solid overall narrative structure to the book--this, I think, is useful for potential readers to know, together with the fact that it is an unusual and honest memoir of a man who has had a difficult life.
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Summary: Expected more...
Review: Perhaps the most overrated book in pop culture. Interesting, yes, definitely. A treatise of philosophical merit or anything of any philosophical interest certainly not. Reading it will only confuse and over simplify what the great thinkers such as Kant tried to achieve. Likely this book says the most about what can happen when an intelligent person lives in a small Western college town.
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Summary: How many people gave it 2, 3, or 4 stars?
Review: That tells you everything you need to know about this book. Nearly every single person that has ever read it has either loved it or hated it. There is no middle ground. And appropriately so. Sure, I can tell you how much I love this book. How I have read it 5-6 times, and listened to it on cross-country trips countless more. But how does that help you? All that tells you is that the book spoke to me. But you know that it speaks to lots of people. And you know that still others can't hear it. I know nothing about you, and so do not know whether you will love or hate this book. But I do know that there will be no middle ground. I suggest that you find out whether you are a ZMM lover or a ZMM hater. And let us know after you read it (we'll be able to tell by whether you gave it 1 or 5 stars--that's what everybody else does!).
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Summary: My Favorite Book
Review: If you look at the customer reviews for this book you will find the gamut: from people who love this book and whose lives were dramatically changed by reading it to people who have vehement hatred of ever having read (or tried to read) it. If I were looking at this review having never read the book this situation would be clue to me that I should check it out. Many of the negative reviews are from people who had a preconceived notion of what this book was before they read it (either from the title or from a recommendation) and were upset that it didn't meet their expectations. It seems to me that these folks have received their zen lesson... For myself, I came to this book with no real expectations and fell in love with the story, the lessons, and the subtleties of their presentation. It truly changed my life. Since acquiring the book in 1980 I have reread it about 10 times and each time I get something different out of it. My recommendation: Read this book but, before you start, put away any expectations that you have for it. If you can't do that maybe you better wait until you get to a place where you can. There's treasure here but you have to be open to receiving it.
Rating: 
Summary: A waste of time.
Review: A good friend raved to me about the book. I read it. Sorry everyone, but I don't think the king has any clothes on. -BB
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.
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