Rating: 
Summary: Not a pompous review!
Review: This is a book that you'll either love or hate... I read this around 1977(?), at the time there were about four of us reading it and it provided a great deal of conversation fodder. It's childish/brilliant in its attempt to tie every conspiracy together in a big sex/drugs/and rock n roll gumbo. Of course, now it seems very dated and silly. Or is it? I do thank Shea and Wilson for indtroducing a lot of folks to the idea that all is not what it seems (fnord) but I think the REAL truth is much more scary.
Rating: 
Summary: Turning your mind into macrame
Review: Forget being tied up in mental pretzels, this book (series) ties your mind into more complex knots, and just when you think you've gotten sorted out and untangled, it turns out that they're just leading to into another configuration of knots.I don't think I've ever read a book that made me feel so ignorant. The authors draw on so many historical, cultural, and mythical references that I knew I'd never get half the references. I fully intend to go through the book, read every (real) publication they refer to, and go back to read it again. Maybe *then* it'll make some sense.
Rating: 
Summary: All that need be said
Review: One doesn't really need to read this trilogy (though I have) to get an insight into "what it's all about". Yes, it's true that one of the lead characters is noted for the admonition "Think for yourself, schmuck!", and I have seen this admonition repeated several times in this forum. But the people in this forum who say, "Think for yourself, schmuck!" are adoring fans of this book and they are responding to the minority who don't like the book at all. The fans of the book appear to have decided that one couldn't possibly be thinking for himself if he just plain doesn't like the book. In other words, "Think for yourself, schmuck!" is just a code phrase for "Think like I do! Think like the majority of us do!" And that by itself, I think, is all that one really needs to know about the content of the book, the authors and the audience to whom the book is directed.
Rating: 
Summary: merely dull
Review: Most of the reactions to this book seem to center around Wilson's half-baked "philosophy", which is the same as that of every other hedonist--to get drugged up, hide your head in the sand and pretend that everything is or will be all right (Wilson predicted in the 70s that by the 90s we would all be immortal space cadets; I am not making this up). No one seems to respond to this book, or any of his other novels, simply as works of fiction, and it is fortunate for him that they do not. Like the rest, this novel is populated by cliched, cardboard cutout characters spouting dialogue so unnatural that even a TV sitcom rings more true; in addition it is weighed down not only by its phony, derivative plot but by an appendix full of cross-referenced subplots that do nothing to advance the story but do much to advance Wilson's and Shea's self-promotion as masters of occult and conspiratorial information. The latter, maybe; the former, never. Wilson cannot understand religion, occultism or mysticism on any but the shallowest level, and his dedication to escapism makes sure that it will stay that way. No wonder most of his fans are such adolescents; Wilson has been seventeen his whole life.
Rating:
Summary: This book will change how you think!
Review: How do i feel about it? I've read this book probably an average of once a year for the last twenty years. Reading it helps clear my mind of all the nonsense the world pushes into it... believe me, i watch President Bush on tv, and i see the fnords on his teleprompter. I consider this book an important part of my overall mental health and worth as a human being. What will it do to you? Love it or hate it, you'll never think the same way again. It will screw with your mind, big-time. I read one review here by someone who hated it... he hated it so much that he actually destroyed the book, the first time he'd ever done that in his life. It MOVED him! I think any book that can inspire that sort of passion, for or against it, is worth reading at least once. Maybe a few dozen more times.
Rating:
Summary: Let's trivialize the lot!
Review: Wilson is a polished, lively, and well-informed writer, and it's easy to see why he is so popular. His public mind could be likened to a floating film of oil, iridescent and glittering with changing colors, but an extremely thin film nevertheless and - dare I say it? - horribly superficial. In this fantastic and confused vision of the modern world he (with his collaborator Shea) has drawn on much of human history, mashed it all up, spiced it generously with animalistic sex, and turned the whole thing into a huge hoot. He has, in short, given thoughtless, irresponsible, and superficial readers of today what they love most - something they can laugh their foolish heads off about, something that will excuse them from both thought and action. I even found myself bursting into laughter once or twice, and I have to admit that some of his jokes are quite good. There is nothing wrong with laughter as such, and certainly not when appropriate. It's a tonic we all need, but Wilson would probably have even found Hitler funny, that is, until he found himself waiting in line to be trundled off to the camps. That might have given him pause. I think that this Great Trivializer might then have found himself rethinking his position. The modern world is filled with folks who are desperately attempting in their various ways to evade reality, and what better way to cash in on this than by encouraging this mass evasion? Wilson is an intelligent man and may have thought: 'Well, if that's what they want let's give it to them. Serious, with people like this, is suicide. Let's turn it all into one huge big fat hoot! Let's trivialize the lot!' The few serious and thoughtful who are still out there should compare Wilson's 'The Illuminatus!' with Jim Marrs' 'Rule by Secrecy.' Both of these writers cover pretty much the same ground, but Marrs is a mature and responsible writer who draws very different conclusions from the evidence. For Marrs, needless to say, those conclusions are no laughing matter.
Rating:
Summary: A Vicious Offense to Human Dignity.
Review: When I was a child, I spake as a child. I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. -1 Corinthians 13.11. Like virtually everyone else, I read this book in high school after I had finished Umberto Eco's _The Name of the Rose_ and _Foucault's Pendulum_, which I greatly enjoyed. I forced myself to finish it simply to prove that I could. Here's the way it is folks: Robert Anton Wilson (RAW - as he refers to himself) is an infant, and he wants to be treated like a screaming brat infant. Give him a slap! His admirers, all suffering from attention-deficit hyper-activity disorder (AD/HD) after reading this book are infantile too. The "philosophy" (certainly not meriting that dignified epithet) behind this book is nothing more than a series of self-competitive hedonistic nonsense progressively aiming to outdo each previous iteration of its own ridiculousness in hopes of achieving something revolutionary - a series of baubles used to amuse three year old babies. However, there is no synthesis, nothing is produced from it. Rather, it would have us all robots driven outside of our minds by every blind and base impulse imaginable in a hedonic frenzy, all the while engaging in remorseless rape of the language to achieve some sort of verbal ecstasy. To overcome the ennuie which immediately ensues we are provided with grandiose puzzles (paradoxes) to contemplate with ever increasing absurdity. This sort of mental hedonism can lead to only one thing, total and complete destruction. It is not the highest in man; rather, it is in fact his lowest. Instead of seeing this as a product of euphoriant intoxication or mental disorder (let's not give it that much credit folks, even drugs or mental disease would produce more profound effects), I prefer to look at it as the product of a reasonably intelligent mind that has chosen to systematically disengage its will. This philosophy comes complete with a means of self-identification among its anarchist followers, through the presence of the word "fnord" appearing at various places in their reviews. As you can tell by reading some of the reviews here many of Wilson's disciples seem to have mastered the art of sesquipedalian obfuscation - an iterative procedure to generate pseudo-profundities by the successive manufacture of nonstandard grammatical combinations through the use of excessively big words. P.S. By the way, if you're going to send me an email calling me a fascist, an "authoritarian personality", a control freak, or whatever other psycho-anarchist buzzword is popular among latte' drinkers don't even bother. I don't respond to that. It seems every time I tell it like it is about Wilson, one of his hypnotized "disciples" sends me hate mail. [If you agree with me on this point, but would still like some alternative type literature to puzzle over, I recommend both Douglas Hofstadter's _Godel, Escher, Bach_ and Mark Danielewsky's _House of Leaves_. For the real Illuminati, read the book _Fire in the Minds of Men_, which discusses the role of freemasonry in the French and Bolshevik revolutions. For conspiracy read Pauwels' and Bergier's _The Morning of the Magicians_. Hell, even Pat Robertson's _New World Order_ and _The Unseen Hand_ by Epperson carry more weight than this.]
Rating: 
Summary: jesus was a green bannana, hail eris, and other in joke crap
Review: i started writting a book about a chaos mage phreaker with brain damage, and a drug problem inadvertantly pissing of an illuminati agent, and ending up saving the world from certain certainty. it was to be a mixture of naked lunch, the matrix, and hp love craft. these bastards beat me to it. the annoying thing was i had already written most of "candle throat" (as it was to be called) when someone gave me a copy of illuminatus. it was annoyingly good and better than mine. but mine didn't have talking dolphins in it. brilliant, funny, clever, acurate etc. one question though, where are the other two?
Rating:
Summary: fnord
Review: I have seen the fnords. 21, 3, 5..... it all adds up. Stay out of Atlantis and your soul(?) is safe fnord.
Rating:
Summary: Endless stream of nonscience
Review: After picking up Danielewski's 'house of leaves' from one of Amazone's lists, and greatly enjoying it, I decided to give 'the Illuminatus trilogy' a try. Unfortunately, I can not be too enthusiastic about this book. While it has its funny moments, that lifted it from a basement rating, I have to consider reading it as a meaningless experience. Life is simply too short, to waste 15 hours of it on a book like this. One of the best criteria to judge any expression of art by is its originality. It may be hard to believe for the 5-star legion, but there is absolutely nothing original about this book. The endless permutations of characters and story lines, the gratuitous porn, the drug-dependent stream of conscience, the fictionalization of facts, the factualization of fiction, all of these and their endless combinations have been done before, and with much better result. The most positive view of this book that I can conjure up is that of a tub of vomit that the authors barfed up after eating at a decent restaurant. You can still recognize the un- or partially digested parts of good ingredients, but their surrounding matrix makes the process far from appetizing. What about the current 4.5 star rating. Just like the book itself, why should I care? I am afraid that I lack the gullibility to read depth in mere stupidity, or intellect in pseudo-clever random manipulation. Poor admirers, get a life, or maybe you guys simply deserve a book like this. Let me end with a quote from Karl Marx's other favorite philosopher Feuerbach: if the horses had a God, it would be a horse.
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