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 two very different things. Anyone who believes that physics is a human construction is welcome to walk out my bedroom window.This error is typical of the book. Expect a lot of windy philosophizing along with some actual insights.
Rating: 
Summary: An allegorical life tale. Fascinating.
Review: To be honest, this book's popularity amazes me. I first read it when it came out in 1974-I was 21 and in college-and, despite the fact I liked the book a lot I couldn't fathom how it ever became a mass market success. Here we are 28 years later and it's in the Top 1000 Amazon sellers. Amazing. Obviously, if you've read previous reviews, you realize this is a divisive book, seen as either revelatory or insipid. The book is heavily philosophical in tone, but at heart it's about finding your allegorical life device. (Had the book been written 20 years later, we'd have used the term paradigm.) For this character, it's motorcycle maintenance. That's not particularly profound, but then, really, not much in life is when you get right down to it. I think a big part of the problem is that people forget this is fiction Admittedly, it's heavily autobiographical and pretentious fiction, but fiction nonetheless. This isn't Bertrand Russell or Kant or Martin Heidegger writing an academic tract meant to profoundly influence the world of philosophical thought. Moreover, anyone who went to college must have somewhere along the line been exposed to a similar character-someone full of his own importance and questions and semi-educated the way undergrads are in philosophy, perpetually blowing his horn. The other thing that never seems to get mentioned that is, to me, a key element that underlies and drives this story is that early on we learn the man has just gotten out of the loony bin having been subjected to electroshock therapy. The man's brains have been artificially addled and he's trying to put things in some sort of order. An allegorical device makes a lot of sense in this context. On the whole this is an entertaining and thought provoking story-the way that, say, Ayn Rand wrote interesting, thought provoking, heavily allegorical yet somewhat unrealistic stories. If you approach the book in that light, I can't see how you can help by enjoy it.
Rating:
Summary: Author was engaged in a futile search.
Review: When I read Zen & the Art back in '76 or so I was bowled over by the author's desperate search for quality. & I'm fairly certain that Pirsig's vocation (tech. editor) compelled me to pursue that same occupation years later.
Since then, however, life experience has interceded & trying to read Zen & the Art again after almost 30 years became a task arduous beyond tolerance. For the author was engaged in a futile search: hunting for quality in every facet of living. Nice, sexy, & positivist-analytical pursuit.
Let me take my own weird notion of "quality" & impose it on my pal John here, my son, my motorcycle, & the faculty in Bozeman. Oops, they don't none of 'em fit: guess it's time to desert my family & end it all.
Sadly, 30 years of Zen & the Art & 150 years of psychoanalysis haven't quite figured out that our withered love affair with Cartesian-dualist analytical reason's at the root of our worldwide wars & skirmishes & individual emotional disasters. Pirsig thought he could live statistically & scientifically: we know that's rubbish, even if it's not widely advertised.
Funny that I imagined Pirsig a sincere but hopeless romantic with an original idea, when every adult in Western civilization does what he did every day--& fails in the same way. Room for one more on the shock treatment table?
A nice sequel to Zen & the Art would've been his admission that he'd been all wrong & that his forcing the square pegs of life into the round hole of quality was a predictable failure. But then that just might destroy the myth of this still-popular tract. & Pirsig & his fellow Americans love nothing more than to retain their myths, even on life support. Just ask Joesph Campbell.
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