Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

An Inquiry Into Values

by Robert M. Pirsig

mass market paperback, 540 pages

English language

Published April 25, 2006 by HarperTorch.

ISBN:: 978-0-06-058946-2

(21 reviews)

"The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called 'yourself.'"One of the most important and influential books of the past half-century, Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a powerful, moving, and penetrating examination of how we live and a meditation on how to live better. The narrative of a father on a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest with his young son, it becomes a profound personal and philosophical odyssey into life's fundamental questions. A true modern classic, it remains at once touching and transcendent, resonant with the myriad confusions of existence and the small, essential triumphs that propel us forward.

43 editions

Geoff reviewed Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

This book started slow and frustrating but redeemed itself by the end. I’m not a philosophy expert by any stretch of the imagination but I found Part 3 engaging and thought provoking.

Part 1 felt, to me, marred by a sort of narcissism that was grating. Both the narrator and the author felt a bit like a “well actually” reply guy except instead of one exhausting tweet, he wrote a whole book.

At one point the narrator describes a time when he felt seen and accepted as his true self, and it was when he stood at the head of a classroom and everyone hung on his every word. This is revealing.

But like I said, although this narcissism never went away, and the narrator remains, to me, deeply unlikable, the philosophy of the later parts drowns it out and it becomes worth reading.

Matthew Royal reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Very little fresh philosophical content; mostly name dropping. There is some small value in introducing some basic philosophical ideas, but there's quite a lot of garbage here to stumble over along the way. This book provides an insufferable meditation on how brilliant Pirsig considers himself:
- teaching Rhetoric by first convincing students of their need for it,
- driving himself mad by getting hung up on an apparent logical contradiction, rather than stepping back and reexamining his assumptions,
- redefining the word "Quality" to mean a 3rd category, separate but equal to "mind" and "matter,"
- inventing a useless, near-religious belief rather than investigating the real meaning and underlying mechanisms of quality.

Rather than switching tracks when he came to the end of the line in his "quality" investigations, Pirsig bashes his head into the buffer stop, and desires his readers to admire his maverick, intellectually honest attitude.

Systems engineering possesses most of the tools for what he was looking -- balancing the interaction of the objective and subjective to arrive at what Quality means for any given thing. The field has existed since the 1940s at Bell Telephone Laboratories and most recent triumphs to Pirsig's time were the Apollo missions. Pirsig should have realized that quality was more of a question of "how" rather than "why" -- "why" leading to the synonymous question of "What is good?" -- "how" leading him to a field of thinkers perhaps disjoint with the group of academic philosphers.

He may admire the rowdy kids in the back of the class, but it's because he, like they, is guilty of not doing his homework.

Simon Vandereecken ~ Nithou reviewed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Review of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Je dois encore processer le livre, mais je me retrouve assez mitigé. J'avoue que si la partie du voyage et la relation entre le père et son fils est extrêmement touchante et transmet cette envie des grands espaces, la partie philosophique m'a parue de plus en plus confuse au fur et à mesure de l'avancement du livre. Là où au tout début elle était pleine d'apprentissage, elle s'enfonce au long du livre dans une vision extrêmement théorique des choses (sans doute proche de la folie du narrateur mais dure à suivre). Donc mitigé mais un bon livre, cependant assez dur à lire j'avoue.