The Dice Man

Rating:
Summary: If I Throw a 6 I'll Give This Book 5 Stars
Review: Shocking, revelatory, hilarious and pornographic novel about a square New York psychiatrist who turns a dice tossing experiment into a lifestyle and ultimately a revolutionary movement.

A self-confessed unreliable memoir with the tart flavour of 1970's hippie, free-love (sex sex sex), anti-establishment ethos (you can just sense Nixon in the background). It may not, as the cover claims, change your life but the odds are you will never look at a die the same way again. Luke Rhinehart shares a literary cell with Fight Club's Tyler Durden. You decide whether it should be padded.


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: Making the Rhinehart Erhard Connection
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.