Review by Choice Review
DiSanto and Steele have produced a valuable study guide to Robert Pirsig's psychological-philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (CH, Jul'74). The first half of this thick guidebook consists chiefly of "A Philosophical Backpack": chapters devoted to Eastern and Western philosophy, which most readers will find intellectually demanding and rhetorically annoying. DiSanto, the author of these chapters, has brilliantly summarized and compared a host of relevant major philosophical positions but has marred his analyses with scores of unintentionally condescending questions and suggestions--e.g., "What do you think?" and "Perhaps you might be interested in developing that analogy." Besides a chronology and map of the novel's journey, this guide further includes previously unpublished sections of Pirsig's manuscript, a lengthy letter from Pirsig to Robert Redford (who was then considering filming the book), nearly 100 pages of reprinted book reviews and scholarly articles, and an annotated bibliography, as well as page-by-page notes and an index to the novel. Although some of its remarks (including a number in the notes) are more ingenious than plausible, this volume is helpful and informative and will make Pirsig's book more accessible to all who read it. D. R. Eastwood United States Merchant Marine Academy
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The authors of this gloss on Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance assert that the popular 1974 novel/travelogue/autobiography ``offers the beginnings of a new metaphysical synthesis'' fusing East and West, intuition and reason, aesthetic and technical approaches to life. As they track Pirsig's narrator and his 11-year-old son, Chris, on their road odyssey from Minnesota to San Francisco, DiSanto and Steele (who teach at Regis College in Denver) unload the narrator's philosophical backpack of Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Hindu and Western ideas. Frequent use of the second person singular (``How do you learn to let go?'') lightens their academic discourse, which serves as a thoroughgoing introduction to Pirsig's bestseller. This primer includes reviews of the work and an entire chapter, cut from Pirsig's original manuscript, which puts the relationship between the narrator and his troubled son in a more positive light. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
