Product Description

The narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son becomes a text which speaks directly to the confusions and agonies of existence, detailing a personal, philosophical odyssey.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2860 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 451 pages

Book Jacket
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an unforgettable trip." --Time

"Disturbing, deeply moving, full of insights ... this is a wonderful book." --Times Literary Supplement

"This book may very well be a profoundly important one--a great one even--full of insights into our most perplexing contemporary dilemmas ... " --New York Times

"I think Mr. Pirsig has written a work of great, perhaps urgent, importance ... Read this book." -- Observer

"A brilliant and original book ... a pathfinding attempt to examine and solve our contemporary ills. Everybody should read it." --Guardian

About the Author
Robert M. Pirsig was born in 1928 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He holds degrees in chemistry, philosophy, and journalism and also studied Oriental philosophy at Benares Hindu University in India. He is the author of this book's sequal, entitled Lila.

Customer Reviews

The Joy of Engagement!
Before reviewing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, let me mention that most people will either love or hate the book. Few will be indifferent.

Those who will love the book will include those who enjoy philosophy, especially those who are well read in that subject; people who ride and maintain their own motorcycles; readers who are interested in psychology, particularly in terms of the mass hypnosis of social concepts; individuals who are curious about the line we draw between sanity and insanity; and people who want to think about how to deal with troubling personal situations, especially as a parent. As someone who has all of these interests and perspectives, the book fit my needs very well.

Those who will dislike the book are people who like lots of action in their novels, dislike the subjects described above, and who want easy reading. This book is very thick with concepts, ideas, metaphors, and layering which reward careful reading and thought. Most text books are considerably easier to read and understand. Few modern novels are any more difficult to read from an intellectual and emotional perspective.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has several story lines that intertwine to create a synthesis of thought and experience:

- a father and young son take a motorcycle trip from the Midwest to California
- the father has an internal dialogue with himself about what he observes about the people around him and their engagement with life and technology
- the father attempts to reconstruct the ideas and perspective he had before being treated as a mental patient (which treatment destroyed and distorted his memory and personality)
- the father looks at the great philosophers of western and eastern civilization and attempts to integrate their thoughts into an aesthetic built around our ability to know quality when we see and experience it
- the father deals with the incipient signs of mental instability in his son and himself.

The book is almost impossible to characterize, but let me try anyway. Perhaps the closest book to this one is Hermann Hesse's Siddharta. At the same time, there is also a strong flavor of Zen and the Art of Archery. On the Road by Jack Kerouac covers some of the same intellectual and emotional territory. John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men considers some of the same questions of personal perspective. In terms of challenging the constrictions of society, there is also an element of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit here.

What is most remarkable about the book is the way that it pinpoints the spiritual vacuum in the pursuit of more and shinier personal items. Unlike many books from this time, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance upholds a concept of nobility and worth connected to pursuing material progress in ways that reflect eliminating low quality and replacing it with high quality. Think of this as being like the joy of craftsmanship, compared to the dullness of the assembly line. By setting high standards, expanding those standards, sharing those standards with others, and inspiring people to experience life more fully, we can move forward spiritually as well as intellectually. The motorcycle maintenance details connect these abstractions back to the practical issues of every day, as we roll along across country with the author and his son dealing with the realities of keeping our bike running where the repair and parts options are very limited.

The book's afterward is particularly interesting, in which Mr. Pirsig opines about why this book has had such great and lasting appeal and tells you what happened after the book ends.

Ultimately, I felt uplifted by the high respect that Mr. Pirsig has for his readers. He takes us very seriously, thinks we are intelligent, and pays us the compliment of believing that we can learn to fundamentally change all of our perspectives and experiences.

After you finish this book (if you decide to read it), I suggest that you think about where you disengaged from the challenges, tasks, and people around you. Then, pick out one area and get deeply involved. As you master that one, take on another. And so on. Soon, you will have new and greater respect for yourself . . . and more rewarding relationships.

Get your hands dirty!

The Book I Would Take With Me On A Desert Island
A father taking his son on a motorcycling trip begins a discourse - he calls it a 'chautauka' - on the nature of 'quality' - that is, human values. What is good and what is bad? How do we know the difference? He examines the two ways that human beings look at the world - the Classical and the Romantic. The Classical divides the motorcycle (for instance) into its components. The Romantic only sees the complete and finished motorcycle. These two ways of looking at reality are both typically human, but are entirely incompatible. We gradually learn, though, that within the motorcyclist's journey there is a deeper journey. He has also come to look for Phaedrus - the character he used to be as a young post graduate student. As the story and the discourse unfold on different levels, we discover that 'Phaedrus' became obsessed with the idea of reconciling these two sets of values - a quest that took him deep into philosophy and eventually to such strange paths that he stepped outside the 'Church of Reason' and was considered insane. After treatment in a mental institution, his Phaedrus personality was removed, leaving him with only the relics of what he used to be and know, like archaeological ruins in a field. The journey, on a third level, is not only to rediscover Phaedrus but also to piece together from these 'ruins' the conclusions he came to. Finally he presents us with an entirely new 'third' way of looking at reality. Whether you accept his conclusions or not (the moral philosopher Mary Midgley gives the idea very short shrift)this book is a brilliant achievment - sad, funny, wise, moving, uplifting, enlightening - it works on many different levels. It is certainly the book I would want to take with me on a desert island.

Superlatives fail me. Please buy it.
A father-and-son tour across the States, deep philosophical ponderings and a tale of personal tragedy combine to form one of the most wonderful true-story books I've ever read.
Throughout most of its length, the book drops fleeting hints of the grief of the Author's past, a terrifying insight into a broken family and a broken mind. But be warned - the warm, bucolic paragraphs of pine forests and fresh air interspersed with the longer tracts of profound philosophical insight will cause you to lower your guard - leaving you exposed and utterly gripped towards the end as the Author reveals the tragic truth to his son...
I can't believe how some snobby reviews belittle this book - maybe its because Phaedrus, the central character, often speaks of attacking the self-opinionated intellectuals of the philosophical establishment. In any case, if you are not a narrow-minded professor who thinks he knows it all, and you are interested in a realtively easy-to-read yet utterly profound and original work, then you will not be dissapointed. If you can handle the heart wrenchingly sad afternotes, get the 25th anniversary edition, its worth every penny. This book is just beautiful but be prepared for tears
Reviewers note: The overuse of the word 'Quality' in this book may irk some readers, especially in this day and age now that the word has aquired a negative stigma due to it being hijacked by the various 'quality' standards bodies throughout the world. Read 'quality' to mean 'the metaphysical properties of goodness' or even sometimes as 'the meaning of life' - on no account does Pirsig mean 'the measure of having been produced according to consistent but irrelevant procedures', nor even 'how well something performs according to its purpose.' I labour on this final point about the word 'Quality' because it has become ubiquitous, spread across the covers of so many second rate business books - so please don't groan and think 'not another book about Quality!' as the modern, perverse meaning of the word is *utterly* not what this gorgeous work is all about.
I will read and re-read this book and give it to my kids when their older. All I can say in summary is, please buy it.