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motorcycle maintenance zen and the art art of motorcycle years ago robert pirsig thought provoking motorcycle trip ever read mental illness must read father and son waste of time cross country son chris books ever highly recommend many people inquiry into values high school years later
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KW
1.0 out of 5 stars Does not holdup
Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2018
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I read this book back in the 70s, and i dont think I finished it back then.

I decided to read it again because Im an avid motorcycle rider and follow eastern spiritual teachings.

The book is not informative on Zen, motorcycle maintenance or operation, philosophy, except on a very superficial level. The author has written a loose autobiography of his own troubled life and mental illness issues, which is sad and tragic, and offers very little except the chance to feel some empathy for the him and his family.

There are several points in the story where the author loses his credibility. When he talks about travelling to India and learning about Buddism from trained teachers, but then confesses that he never actually practiced meditation, and then rejected the teachings, his experience it completely invalid. Meditation is not something you talk about and grasp mentally and then progress. It is something you do. It is an experience that you engage in, it alters the way you think and your perception of the world. If he had actually sat down and practiced mindfulness meditation then he would not have become obsessed with words contests between Greek philosophers, and ended up having a nervous breakdown and being subjected to electroshock therapy. He rejected the teachers in India who would have helped him gain understanding, and ran off on his own path to personal destruction.

I dont know why this was a best seller in the 1970s. It does not hold up after all these years. If you want to learn about zen and Buddhism read the public domain book "Mindfulness in Plain English". If you want to read a book that really touches on the zen of motor vehicle repair, get the original VW manual by John Muir "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive". Even if you dont own a vintage air cooled VW vehicle, it is a good insight into hands on mechanical work, and the positive mental state that this book fails to capture.

I wish I had found an honest review of this book before I purchased it for my kindle, I would have skipped it and read something else.
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Cameron
1.0 out of 5 stars The most self righteous/pretentious thing I've read
Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2019
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Was recommended this book, and was so disappointed. I hated every moment of it, wishing for it to end. But I still finished it.

The best part is the narrative on the road with his son, the rest of the book, and 'philosophy' is rubbish. Pseudo intellectuals will love this book. Hipsters trying to be relevant will relish in it's self righteous nonsense.

I didn't care for anything he was trying to 'discover', nor did I think it mattered. Really was just one giant wank fest for the writer.

I haven't been this disappointed in a book in a long time.
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Ari
5.0 out of 5 stars Read this. Then read it again decades later.
Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2017
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In high school I would have told you this is my favorite book. I just re-read it 2 decades later. And I realize that I grasped about 20% of it at the time. Maybe. Something about the meandering philosophical flow captured my imagination at the time. But reading it now, as a father, I grasp the concepts underneath. I don't readily admit this but I wept at the end. Then I read the afterward and totally lost it. Beautiful, courageous work.
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Tim C
5.0 out of 5 stars Word of Warning -- Skip the Introduction
Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2018
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Just finished reading this book for the first time and I very much enjoyed it. I could easily see myself reading it again at some point; and I would highly recommend it to others.

However, if you purchase this 25th edition of the book as I did, BE WARNED. It leads with an Introduction that completely divulges the ending of the story as well as other major plot points throughout the book. I can't fathom why it was ever decided to lead with this. It was written as if anyone reading the book now must have surely read the book before, and this is obviously not the case. The introduction would have been a lovely addition at the END of the book, but was infuriating to encounter at the beginning. It was enough that I considered writing a personal letter to the author, only to find out that he's dead and that my only feedback can be here to act as a warning to others.
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Linda Blanchard
5.0 out of 5 stars Plenty of Buddhism in this book, it's just not overt
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2015
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Looking at the reviews here, this book is loved by hundreds and reviled by a small percentage. I wonder what causes so much passion? It's wonderful that we have, among those who gave the book just one star, so many people who are so far above it intellectually -- too familiar with philosophy, too personally enlightened, perhaps -- to find any value in it. But I would like to point out to the subset of our best and brightest, those who tell everyone else not to waste their time reading it, that just because you got nothing out of the book doesn't mean no one else will.

One of the complaints I see here is that there isn't much of the title's Zen nor much motorcycle maintenance, either -- and I note that the author says something about this in his introduction, so it must be true, right? -- yet I believe there is plenty of both. If the reader is expecting an introduction to Zen or a How To manual on motorcycle maintenance, those will not be found. It's not even the author sharing his enjoyment of either of the two fields with his audience. But the themes that run throughout the book explore many of the same ideas the Buddha did, and several concepts important to motorcycle maintenance that will not be found in manuals are discussed throughout the work. But the title really represents the duality that Pirsig puts under his microscope: Zen represents the hippie "go with the flow" attitude that is contrasted to the "slice and dice" schemes of technology, via motorcycle maintenance. And in the end, the title doesn't say just motorcycle maintenance; it's the "Art " that's critical, because one thing the book is aiming for is to show us that the science of technology is an art -- or at least should be an art -- and that the two ways of looking at life don't need to be in opposition, but can be quite naturally blended, to the benefit of all concerned.

It might seem like the novel is caught in its time, with language about those who see things as "groovy" vs. "the squares" but the dichotomy between the two has been under discussion in various forms for centuries: romanticism vs. empiricism, passion vs. logic, science vs. religion. The same split is found today underlying two sides of the debate over climate change. If the book is not approached as being literally about Zen and motorcycle maintenance, but as using these as stand-ins for concepts that can be much larger -- or even much smaller -- there is a lot to be gained here.

Another complaint is that the protagonist is not sympathetic, but that's because this isn't a novel written from the romantic side, nor, really, the empirical side -- it's not even a novel, though it reads a lot like one -- it is a true-enough tale of relationships between two related men, and a father and a son, and a road trip that carries with it time for plenty of slow discussion of philosophy. The book takes its time putting the pieces together, and the author isn't trying to win our love -- if you can approach the book on its own terms rather than with a whole load of expectations about what it should do and how it should do it, you may get something out of it -- but to truly enjoy it, you've got to go with the flow, you know?

I know I get a lot out of it every time I read it. I love road stories, and this one is paced just like a real long-distance trip, with long stretches of time to think things through interspersed with short breaks for taking care of the business of life. That what's going on in the environment, relationships, and other encounters reflects what's being thought through in the long stretches is a small bonus. The writing is clean and evocative, enjoyable. For the most part, the carefully constructed introduction to all the elements needed to understand the philosophy is gentle enough to be clear and not overly taxing, at least until the deepest parts, which can be hard to follow (and for good reason). The elements of psychological mystery captivate me each time.

I first read ZAMM the year it was released, in the mid-70s, and have read it at least every five years since then, and each time I thoroughly enjoy it. The first time through, I could not follow the philosophy all the way down into the descent into madness it brought on. Five years later -- with time for the ideas to be examined through my own life -- I got it, even agreed with it. This time, this reading, is the first time I ended up doubting the validity of the greatest philosophical insights the story offers. Ironically, it's my deepening understanding of Buddhism that changed my mind.

There really is a lot of Buddhism in this book, and not specifically Zen, either, but the deepest themes common to all forms of Buddhism. The questions about the wisdom of dividing the world up into a duality of the physical vs. the mental, of seeing ourselves as somehow separate from everything else, these were explored by the Buddha, too, though the framework he used to discuss these ideas was -- obviously -- nothing to do with motorcycles. In Dependent Arising he, too, considers how it comes to be that we split the world in two. "Name and form" he calls this split, and later thinkers have described what he was talking about as the same subject-object division that Pirsig is mulling over in ZAMM. The Buddha, though, says that it is "desire for existence" -- not quality -- that, to borrow Pirsig's phrase, "is the generator of everything we know". I tend to agree with the Buddha because I can see in our lives, and through our sciences, what that desire for existence is and why it drives us to divide the world up the way we do, and exactly how it leads us into trouble. I can't say the same for Pirsig's metaphysics, but that doesn't stop me from deep enjoyment of the book. I hope to have another half-dozen five-yearly reads, if I'm lucky, and -- who knows -- maybe I will come around again to see it the way he does.
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Kindleworm Dot Com
5.0 out of 5 stars An absolute classic must read before you die book...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 2, 2019
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It’s one of those ubiquitous books that’s kept turning up on library shelves, charity shop shelves and bookshop shelves throughout my life and yet i’ve always walked away from it, until now.

I’ve always had quite a deep interest in Zen and it always seemed to me that putting it with motorcycle maintenance just wasn’t something i wanted to know about. But now i have a motorbike that needs some maintenance and this book turned up in Kindle daily deals for 99p i thought the time was right.

But oh, how wrong i’ve been all these years. It’s not a book about Zen or how to fix a motorbike while practising Zen, it’s a wholly different thing altogether.

In fact, it’s a road trip book where our narrator takes his son on a road trip on an old motorbike across the USA. But it’s a road trip with a difference.

At it’s heart it’s a book about insanity, the condition of society and its relationship to technology, and a fair bit of Greek philosophy as well; and it’s all broken up with the story of the road trip. And it’s simply, awesome.

With hindsight i’m happy that i’ve never read it until now as i’m much older and it really blended nicely with my own life experiences: having dropped out of a Philosophy degree course for much the same reasons and now many years later i can look back and see things more clearly.

And the ending in the ‘Afterword’ is what truly completes this book. It really is a masterpiece of writing.
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ExRx
4.0 out of 5 stars Challenging read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 10, 2017
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This is a challenging book to read and I admit it took a while to 'get to grips with it'.
I feel; personally speaking, that this is a book I will need to re-read to fully understand all that it offers, but I can understand the criticism offered by others who find it puzzling, banal or just self-indulgence by the author.
The author was clearly very intelligent and well versed in Classical literature
Having completed the book, I found this to be one of, [if not the hardest book I have ever read]. The author seemingly was dealing with his own intellectual struggles with the duality of life and this is the context of the book, set within a motorcycle journey that he took previously and which he now repeats with his son and a couple of friends.
It is my take, that it was written to illustrate both the perspectives of himself now when 'recovered'; and also his recollections of earlier perspectives of his mind whilst he was facing these challenges. We would label these mental health challenges, [I think he records it as catatonic schizophrenia], but I like the alternative supposition posed by the author when he suggests a Zen perspective for the dichotomous struggles of his mind/personality.
He uses motorcycle maintenance as a metaphor for some of the aspects of our man-made constructs of human life and learning.
I have learnt from reading this book and would like to see it made into a film, if someone intuitive enough had the capacity to properly demonstrate the meanings and the lessons that Mr Pirsig was trying to tell us about.
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A book whose time has come again.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 15, 2020
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In fact its time has never gone away. This ingenious book gets to the heart of what has ailed Western, and now global, culture for hundreds of years, while telling a compelling story that combines a road trip with the slow revelation of a journey through mental collapse. Expect to be challenged to think hard during philosophical passages, as well as delighted by the parallel stories of the narrator's road trip, his relationship with his son, who rides with him, and his re-creation of his previous self. In today's world where we are increasingly seeing the catastrophic results of putting 'reason' and apparent objectivity before true value-based judgements in our relationship with nature, this book deserves to be read by everyone who has a mind and cares about how they use it.
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dtp man
1.0 out of 5 stars Discarded
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 2, 2020
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One can see why this book was a hit when published in the 1970s - coming after the Beatles met maharishi and transcendental meditation. This book an exploration of what man and machine (and what more male symbolic than a motorbike) is all about.
Not only dated (philosophical thought, even SF thinking advanced in last 50 years), Pirsig's painting with words becomes more and more abtsract as the chapters pass. They say all art is to get a reaction. For me it was not only finding some of his brush strokes (thinking) disagreeable, but also, mainly eye/mind glazing boredom/bafflement. Book discarded under half way through.
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Colliedog
5.0 out of 5 stars It’s good to be back.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 25, 2018
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So good to revisit this book after 42 years. In all that time I’ve never come across anything quite like it. It had a profound impact on my life in 1976, and I’m feeling it now all over again - still powerful, but in a different way.
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