Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

By Robert M. Pirsig

  • Release Date: 2009-04-21
  • Genre: Fiction & Literature
Score: 4.5
4.5
From 594 Ratings

Description

THE CLASSIC BOOK THAT HAS INSPIRED MILLIONS

A penetrating examination of how we live and how to live better

Few books transform a generation and then establish themselves as touchstones for the generations that follow. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one such book. This modern epic of a man’s search for meaning became an instant bestseller on publication in 1974, acclaimed as one of the most exciting books in the history of American letters. It continues to inspire millions. 

A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions on how to live. The narrator's relationship with his son leads to a powerful self-reckoning; the craft of motorcycle maintenance leads to an austerely beautiful process for reconciling science, religion, and humanism. Resonant with the confusions of existence, this classic is a touching and transcendent book of life.

This new edition contains an interview with Pirsig and letters and documents detailing how this extraordinary book came to be.

Reviews

  • Captivating

    5
    By bigerm69
    It’s my 3rd time reading this book and at different stages in my life. I am in my 50’s now. Amazing how the same words can bring new meaning.
  • Too psychological for me

    2
    By MIA737CA
    I couldn’t make myself finish this. It became all about psychology and didn’t seem to have much story to go along with it
  • Mind blown!!

    5
    By hmshector
    This is the best book I ever read. Essential reading for anyone. It’s the first book I want to read again and made notes to remind myself to read again
  • Book changed?

    3
    By airbelow
    Read this book many years ago in hardcover. I loved it! I finally got around to purchase the digital addition, and read the author’s opening note about what he had changed to make the book better, which made me nervous. How could he make it better? He didn’t!
  • Well done. Thought provoking.

    5
    By Joseph_Joseph
    The personal recount of the journey is a very interesting and a powerful adventure of the spirit and the mind. I also purchased this ebook after first reading this book 34 years ago. I yearned to reread this. I felt a profound empathy and relearned again of the many aspects of life. The intertwined thoughts and rationale made me think deeply again. Through the years I have thought of this book and never forgot the suggestion of how to best travel - I won’t give it away. I caution you to not read the very lengthy reviews by a couple of persons (July 31 and December 13) since they do a disservice of giving the ending away and not having the courtesy of indicating a “spoiler alert”. This lack of etiquette is poorly missing in those reviews. I hope this remark will make your reading that much more enjoyable by avoiding those reviews.
  • DOES NOT feature a Reader’s Guide

    1
    By tamiCmunk
    Contrary to the description, this 25th anniversary Quill addition DOES NOT feature a Reader’s Guide; it DOES NOT include discussion topics, an interview with the author, and letters and documents detailing how this extraordinary book came to be. Save you money and buy the $2.00 edition.
  • Read this again for the first time.

    5
    By Windsornewtonandjack
    I attempted this gem of a book back in the 70's when I was in my 20's. I had no sense of real identity or purpose. I went through the actions to impress my girlfriend, got bogged down, and never finished. Thankfully, I resisted any temptation to read ahead to see what happens. I'm now in my early 60's, have succeeded at fatherhood (my son Alex is now 33, adequately happy and both financially and spiritually successful no thanks to me), and failed miserably at marriage. Somehow I am still married to Alex's mom and have come to a new understanding about what in life is of lasting importance. It took a 40 year struggle with alcoholism, anger, fear and resentment to arrive at a place I can only think of as heaven on Earth. Enter ZATAOMM. So many things are moving me to tears these days and this enlightened journey across the Northwest on motorcycle with son in tow was no exception. A brilliant read. Just when you think you might lose your mind navigating through the web of metaphysical, spiritual, philosophical enlightenment, the author draws you back to the well crafted descriptions of his travels across the Dakotas, Montana, and to the Pacific coastline so you can breathe again. Back and forth, up and down, side to side this work takes you in so many directions and forces so many emotional reactions that run the gamut. It truly is a work for all time. gl
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

    5
    By EdCamV
    A high Quality read 5/5
  • I thought it was a Quality book.

    5
    By Sisi Mack
    That's all.
  • A Fascinating Read--Several, Actually

    5
    By wdchkgsqrl
    I just reread Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM), forty years after the first time in college. It's a different book seen through the eyes of a 65-year-old man, particularly one who was a philosophy major, Methodist seminary graduate, licensed family therapist, and who practices Zen meditation. For me, ZMM was several books. Like many contemporary novels that constantly shift from scene to scene to keep our attention, ZMM shifts constantly—multiple times in most chapters—between a philosophical story and a psychological, interpersonal one. Much of its power derives from the fact that ZMM is based on Pirsig's own life. Others have well-summarized the “plot”, so I won't reiterate that. 1) ZMM is a philosophical novel. Pirsig was an English professor and teacher of Rhetoric, a blend of writing, persuasion and philosophical argument. The book recalls Pirsig's multi-year search to define Quality. Heavy on the Greek philosophers, Pirsig presents argument after argument, originating in a variety of settings, through a series of daily chautauquas, over the course of his motorcycle road trip with his young son in 1960's America. Pirsig is quite good at the metaphor/smilie game, relating many of his arguments to how one keeps a motorcycle running. The “Zen” part of the book is that the Quality Pirsig seeks to define is less a matter of “either-or” (rational vs romantic thinking) and more like something else, represented by Plato's Forms (eidos), or the Buddha's thinking. As a former philosophy major and a Zen meditator, this is familiar territory to me. My difficulty with ZMM was that Pirsig is a lot smarter than I and often left me in the dust of his arguments. Like a lot of brilliant people, he is also arrogant and convinced that his views are correct and nearly all others, stupid. Another reviewer of the book noted that non-philosophers are often awed by Pirsig's reasoning, while those who know a bit about philosophy are less so. Nonetheless, the philosophical part of this novel was a fun ride. 2) ZMM is also a psychological journey. Early on it become clear that Pirsig was quite obsessive. One of my Old Testament professors remarked that “Fundamentalism is less a theological position than a psychological problem.” Pirsig often exhibited something like fundamentalist zeal. As I read ZMM, I wondered if Pirsig's dogmatic certainties weren't as much a function of his psychological issues—his compulsive nature—as anything else. Over the course of the book, Pirsig related how his thinking became clearly obsessive , occupying his mind 18, 20, 22 hours per day, until he could no longer sleep. Pirsig crashes and burns, is diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, is hospitalized several years and receives shock treatments. He is open about all this, and about the damage it does to his relationships, particularly with his own son, Chris, his companion on this journey. A recurrent theme is Pirsig's fear that Chris' psychological makeup parallel's his own. A fascinating aspect of all this is the psychological distance that forms between the narrator Pirsig and his former self, whom he calls Phaedrus (also the name of a Platonic dialog). After hospitalization and treatment, Pirsig has forgotten a lot about Phaedrus, and the psychological track of ZMM recounts the slow recovery of Pirsig's memories about Phaedrus' earlier decline. As I followed Pirsig's no-holes-barred recounting of this decline, I often had the sense I was watching a slow-motion psychological and interpersonal train wreck. ZMM is a difficult read, but an excellent one. Chris, whom I had grown to love in the book, was murdered some years after the book's publication, and ZMM's Afterword contains an interesting glimpse of how Pirsig's mind and psyche continued to evolve after ZMM was published.

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