Rating: 
Summary: Not even if I was in prison!
Review: I picked this book up on the recommendation of someone I thought would have good taste in books. I could have saved myself a lot of time, and $18, if I had just opened up the cover and read the 1st page reviews, particularly the following:"More important than Ulysses or Finnegans Wake"
-Timothy Leary This illustrious example of what's wrong with society was the ONLY person willing to attach their name to their comment. Take the following: ...A hundred pages in I couldn't figure out why I was wasting my time with this nonsense....after three hundred I was having too much fun to quit, and by the end I was eager to believe every word - I loved it.
-Rolling Stone To Mr. Anonymous at Rolling Stone: you are accurate only in the first part of your statement. Another un-named person at Limit said, "...you won't be able to put it down." Did you have glue on your fingers?!? My opinion should be obvious by now. Before I go any further with my opinion, let me explain in brief the book: This is three volumes in one book, making up one story, pretending to be fiction based on fact. It is about a world conspiracy, starting before the dawn of civilization, by a loosely connected group called the Illuminati. They are being battled by another group(s), primary of which is the Discordian Society, a group of militant anarchists. (If you have read, or tried to read, the Principia Discordia - the modern "bible of Discordianism (worship of Eris the the goddess of Chaos)" then you have a good idea of the style of this book. It ties together the Kennedy assassinations, George Washington's supposed pot-farms, UFO's, Atlantis, the Ishmalian sect, and any other group you can come up with using a convoluted numerological system, defying intelligence. There is no flow to this book. Characters, times, locations, all change from one paragraph to the next. Sometimes even in the MIDDLE of a paragraph. Published in 1975, there are an unimaginable number of drug-related "scenes", more accurately - acid trips. The characters are all pot-smoking acid-freaks, not one of which is likable. It is filled with vulgarity, raunchiness, blasphemy, and idiocy. (I spent a LONG time in the US Navy. I have thick skin, and seen and heard "more disgusting things than anyone ought.") The appendices pretend to give the historical basis for the story, but are also riddled with fiction. The point the book tries to make is "Don't trust anyone ever." I certainly wouldn't trust these authors. To be fair I only read 400 out of the 800 pages in this book. (If I had been given this book, or checked it out of a library, I would have thrown it down a LONG time ago, but since I was robbed ... for this, I threw good time after bad money. If a book this size doesn't turn around in 400 pages, quit). Those would be the first volume (The Eye in the Pyramid), half of the second (The Golden Apple), and the appendices. I have read hundreds of books, and now quit only three. This is the WORST book I have ever picked up! For comparison: I have studied Greek Culture, Symantics, Aeronautical Engineering, Heat Transfer & Fluid Flow, Nuclear Engineering & Reactor Physics and Theory. These can be boring. (OK, they are boring.) But I finished them all (not that I had much choice.) Ever read God-Emperor of Dune? This is worse! It at least had twenty-or-so pages at the beginning and end that were ok, with the middle 400 being excruciating. How about Al Gore's Earth in the Balance? Illuminatus! is even more asinine. Will Durant's Life of Greece? Far less organized. It is a rare treat when you actually get two pages straight with the same characters in the same time.
If the person who ever recommended this book said "This chocolate ice-cream sure is good!", I'd just throw the carton away without bothering to try a spoonful. There is NO coherency in this book. It is not entertaining or funny (with the exception of two paragraphs dealing with a book reviewer reviewing this same book, giving roughly the same opinion. Oh, by the way, these two paragraphs are around a hundred pages apart.) It isn't thought-provoking. It only makes you SURE you don't want to drop acid. In summary, I wouldn't read this book if I was serving a life sentence in prison.
Rating: 
Summary: cornelius and arkwright
Review: This has to be one the greatest book ever written. I do not say this lightly. This book breathes with life energy. The secrects of the universe hide in these pages. Robert Anton Wilson is a genius of the first order. He takes you on a trip that never stops even after reading the book. You see worlds within worlds, reality limited only by the imagination. I have ventured to read this work several times and will probably read it several more times, and each time I do I see something new in it. This story, to me, is the culmination of a literary philosophy of physics. The idea that we live in a universe with endless alternate realities, that perception can not be trapped by in an either/or scenario. The idea of this multiverse can be seen expertly in several other great tomes as well. Both Michael Moorcock's Cornelius Chronicles and Brian Talbot's Adventures Of Luther Arkwright. However, one can not deny the level of unrelenting unreality or reality in Wilson's book. He takes their concepts to the nth degree. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in all the possibilities. If this book showed me anything, it was that there is no limit to those possibilities.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful, Entertaining, Thought-Provoking
Review: I have very little to add to the 175 reviews which, thus far, have given The Illuminatus! Trilogy a 4.5 rating, except that I would heartily recommend this book/trilogy to anyone who has ever had an inkling of conspiracy theory creep into the back of his or her mind. Buy this book. You won't regret it.
Rating:
Summary: Terrible
Review: Save yourself the money. While I am a big fan of comedic nonsense like Catch-22, this book provided no entertainment value to me whatsoever. I always finish what I read, but I had to put a gun to my own head to force myself through book 1, and I didn't consider for one second starting books two or three.
Rating: 
Summary: Dangerous Entertainment
Review: I must admit, this book is wildly entertaining. However, I took off three stars because of the way in which it mangles the more complex philosophical questions. Wilson preaches a very narrow, dogmatic ethic of paranoia-- "A, and never B, is what the smart person is afraid of, and C, and never D, is how he can escape..." and that in itself would not be so bad, had he not also disguised it, very effectively, as open-minded nonpartisan questioning or "neophilia." He accomplishes this disguise through a...very superficial...PRETENSE that he does not arrive at a single answer. Thus, he manages to obscure the real questions, and possibly the anawers, for those potentially insightful minds with little training in critical evaluation. Please do not take this book at all seriously if you are seeking wisdom. I doubt that Wilson himself does so, unless I underestimate his intelligence. In fact, to view this book as a parody of liberal-progressive metaphysics and the "X-Files" fnord contingent would be a much more enlightening, and funny, approach.
Rating:
Summary: Do what thou wilt....
Review: Wilson and Shea turn the 60s and the 70s on their heads. Just about any conspiracy will turn up in this magnum opus. A classic in Nixon era paranoia! And you thought the Americal Medical Association was just a bunch of doctors....I also recommend Umberto Eco's " Foucault's Pendulum " for anyone who enjoys this trilogy. Truly mesmerizing.
Rating: 
Summary: Great fun, but it's A JOKE
Review: I know Robert Anton Wilson may believe some of what he wrote in this book, but I am sure that it is supposed to be fun, humorous, and of course-preposterous. It is of course thought provoking, and lampoons everything from Marxism to Ayn Rand. It is also very drug influenced. This is the downfall of the book for me. I think the over abundance of drugs in the book takes away from the message and value of the book. That's just me personally. Take it for what it's worth.
Rating:
Summary: The Matrix before 'The Matrix'
Review: Remember the feeling you had in your mind when you saw "The Matrix"?...the not-quite-right, surreal sensation that all you knew could be nothing but a delusion? Throw that into a blender, along with every other superstition, fantasy, illusion and fear you've ever known.
Reading this book is like sending your delighted mind off on a roller coster...in flames.
Drugs? You'll be high on possibilies.
Fuggedaboudit! An Alice in Wonderland for the New Millenium- and a world in need of an alternate reality- and a belly full of laughter.
Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Review: The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson is a wild ride indeed. The trilogy is: The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan. Keep and open mind while reading this book... you'll need it. It comprises of ultimate conspiracy, humor, sex and violence, with true imagination that will bring you in and out of time and space... a truly wild ride. This is an epic fantasy, detective, thriller, and sprinkled with humor all rolled into one. Conspiracies abound, pinnacles of power assulted, and mind wrenching reality are the fare here. When you finish this book, your eyes will look at reality differently, your mind will look at things very differently. I found the humor to be devilish, with puns galore, and ironies that will make you think. This Science Fiction is destined to be a classic. But rememder this, always keep an opened mind and you'll come away from this experience with a far greater outlook than before you came into this book. An experience very well written that will leave the reader feeling like they rode on the roller coaster of life.
Rating: 
Summary: Deprogramming
Review: As one person said when they recommended this book "It is bootcamp for the mind". It was a spiral of the strange and bizzar mixed with interesting factoids and grand illusions of super secret societies. Nothing is what it seems and yet at the same time it is everything it appears on the surface. I was facinated till the end. I recommened this book to all who are looking for something outside of the normal.
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