Rating: 
Summary: Back in print! This weird book will set your mind spinning!
Review: I feel about "Dice Man" a bit like I feel about Ayn Rand's novels: Both begin in our real world and proceed to carry us towards an alternate (superior?) life structure envisioned by the author. I can't see either vision as a complete blueprint for re-forming my life, and yet the ideas are extremely thought-provoking and powerfully expressed. I'm glad I read "Dice Man"; it's unique. It's also very enjoyable, if you have a taste for dark and absurd humor.Interestingly, the story is told from the first person point of view of a New York psychologist named Luke Rhinehart. That's the name of the actual author of the book (a pen name). There is also a sequel, "Search for the Dice Man", although that is only in print in England. You can get it from Amazon's United Kingdom store, www.amazon.co.uk.
Rating:
Summary: Seems tame now . . .
Review: This is a classic subversive book from the early 70s, banned in several countries (but I managed to smuggle it into South Africa). There are strong links to the anti-psychiatry sentiments of the time, but it's not a book to be taken literally, and definitely not as a guide for sensible living. It's funny, outrageous and moving. It's a catalyst for deeper-than-normal thought. It'll always have a cult following. If you don't read "The Diceman", your life will be poorer for it.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've ever read
Review: This book is really weird. I have read it several times and still love it. It is one of those books that makes an impression on you that will stay. It's a classic.
Rating:
Summary: Back in print! This weird book will set your mind spinning!
Review: I feel about "Dice Man" a bit like I feel about Ayn Rand's novels: Both begin in our real world and proceed to carry us towards an alternate (superior?) life structure envisioned by the author. I can't see either vision as a complete blueprint for re-forming my life, and yet the ideas are extremely thought-provoking and powerfully expressed. I'm glad I read "Dice Man"; it's unique. It's also very enjoyable, if you have a taste for dark and absurd humor. Interestingly, the story is told from the first person point of view of a New York psychologist named Luke Rhinehart. That's the name of the actual author of the book (a pen name). There is also a sequel, "Search for the Dice Man", although that is only in print in England. You can get it from Amazon's United Kingdom store, www.amazon.co.uk.
Rating: 
Summary: Humourous Story that provides an essential truth
Review: Rhinehart's book provides the reader with engaging story with fairly rich characters to facilitate the assertion of a psycho philosophy. The story is an argument for the idea that nothing is any way. It challenges consensus and really has the reader question their own prejudices, paradigms and morals while entertaining. This book would be in a genre of self-help-fiction-philosophy.
Rating:
Summary: Die Will Be Done
Review: This is one of the most hilarious novels I've ever read despite all of the type-o's and incorrect grammar, but maybe the mistakes were intentional, who knows. I must say that I've never read a novel as pornographic as this one. All the sex might have had the effect of overshadowing what is truly an amazing philosophical idea and this might be the reason for its being dismissed by the public. For me this novel gives me courage to face my own pending schizophrenia. All of us are born with a splintered, spontaneous, amorphous being which is subsequently suppressed into unity by our parents, school, and all of society. The die, Rhinehart believes, is a tool that helps us return to that innocent splintered state, where anything is possible. Through conscientious dice play, a man should reach the point where there is no opposition between randomness and your own mind. Your mind, essentially, becomes the die, and all of your repressed selves are given equal opportunity to reign. The unified self is then broken and one achieves a Zen-like enlightenment. So in the end, we come to realize that there is no you, there is no me. Everything's a lie including the words we use. And once we kill our incessant need for order and simplification, only then can true learning begin.
Rating:
Summary: Lucky Luke aka Don Psychote
Review: According to Time Out, this book was one of the most fashionable novels of the early 1970s; and Anthony Burgess, the author of the unsettling "A Clockwork Orange" (1962), graced it with the comment "touching, ingenious and beautifully comic." "The Dice Man" is a dark comedy, violent and hilarious at the same time; an upbeat precursor to the much grimmer "American Psycho" (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis, and the similarly satirical "The Elementary Particles" (1998) by the French author Michel Houellebecq. With a light touch and in mischievously entertaining fashion, the book plays with the fundamentals of the way we understand ourselves: rationality, identity, reality; in sum, all the ways in which we construct coherence from chance, or something from nothing. Luke Rhinehart, the author (in fact, the real author's pseudonym) and narrator of the book, is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Luke's actions are largely dictated by chance. He writes down alternative actions and then tosses dice to determine which action to take. The result, he claims, is freedom to live different sides of his personality. As an author, for example, he lets the dice decide what he should write in his fictional autobiography with the title "The Dice Man" and what not; and the dice decide when he should lie and when not. Consequently, he announces on page one that he is the author of "the lovely first-rate pornographic novel, Naked Before the World" only to reveal much later in the book that the dice ordered him not to write about this piece of fiction in "The Dice Man." Too bad, dear reader. The book works not only as a send-up of the psychoanalytic profession and the counter-culture of the late 1960s, it also succeeds at creating its own twisted reality - as attested by all the readers who felt that their view of the world had been profoundly changed by this novel. It is ironic that "The Dice Man" has a cult following while the book makes fun of the cult of Dice Living created by the fictional Luke Rhinehart. In a sense the cult following includes the real author himself who produced a couple of sequels to this book. The irony should not come as a surprise, though. Authors who are seriously unserious run a high risk of creating ironic side effects. One of the earliest examples is the Daoist philosopher Lao-Tse (born BC 604). He blissfully ignored the irony in his "Dao De Jing," a book that declares in the first sentence "the Dao that can be told is not the real Dao" and then goes on for some 5,000 words to explain what the Dao is. In sum, "The Dice Man" is recommended for readers who are willing to suspend the sense of their own importance for the sake of enjoying a fictional world, and to tolerate an alien system of morality for the time it takes to read this original and amusing satire.
Rating: 
Summary: Making the Rhinehart Erhard Connection
Review: Weird logic? A cult following? An anti-psychiatry bias? Can it be, oh my, I'll betcha. Perhaps they are in close communication yet. Or spiritual twins, maybe, with the Aryan Germanic "nom de guerre" being the thing that jumped out at me. One wonders if Werner Erhard, who bragged he hadn't read a book in years, has perused Mr. Rhinehart's work. Was he pleased, entertained, or did he have the usual narcissistic reaction of rage at the gall of someone "copying" his ideas? Making the connection isn't really that much of a leap, just a look at the list of other books written by the author. His obeisance to his original inspiration should indicate a cautionary disclaimer; No matter how bad it looks on the surface, its sub rosa content is exponentially worse. If you liked est, this will probably make perfect sense to you.
Rating:
Summary: addictive and utterly irresistible.
Review: Luke pushes you to the limit of your own logic, slowly making you understand him. You end up embracing his logic only so he can take you places you'd never go. Sort of in a Nabokov way, you become Humbert Humbert, only to realize that in this case, Lolita is your own destiny, and you are messing with her in ways you really shouldn't. And it's so funny, it's addictive.
Rating:
Summary: Should be a movie
Review: Which is not to say it shouldn't be a book, which it is, and a good one. Five stars. And I disagree with the reviewer who said is should be shorter. I think it should have been longer. In fact I almost only gave it four stars for being too short. But it's five stars the way it is. Only it would have been more stars (if they let you) if it were longer.
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