We might call it a metaphysical primer that is, of all things, fun to read. Or we might just call it quality.
The author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance returns with a hodgepodge collection on the slippery concept of quality.
Assembled by Pirsig’s wife, Wendy, after the author’s death in 2017, the book distills the metaphysical essence of the generation-defining Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and its lesser-known sequel, Lila, into an accessible philosophical handbook. Excerpting from Pirsig’s letters, interviews, presentations, and books, the text seeks to offer clarity on the concept of quality—even though it “cannot be defined.” To philosophically inclined readers for whom this paradox is intriguing, this book will prove to be a handy reference. To readers for whom Zen is less a treatise in disguise than a story of a father-son road trip, this distillation may seem superfluous. Still, it’s arguably the best chance for quality to receive the kind of philosophical scrutiny Pirsig thought it could withstand. In a letter from 1995, he wrote, “There are many other problems solved by the [Metaphysics of Quality] but any of the above seems to me to justify it as a major philosophic system. That it solves all of them simultaneously makes it of unequalled magnitude.” It’s interesting, historically, that this is where Pirsig’s ideas should end up. As he describes in the talk that serves as the book’s introduction, he wrote Zen as a novel precisely to avoid the impression of being “high and mighty and talking down” to readers. By making the narrator a man on a motorcycle trip, he notes, “we get another dimension to the entire story. Now we no longer have a person talking from a pulpit. We have a person out in front, out in the open, in real life.” Either that concern was unfounded or Wendy’s editorial efforts have obviated it. Though sometimes scattered, the book is impassioned and serious but never condescending—and always generous.
We might call it a metaphysical primer that is, of all things, fun to read. Or we might just call it quality.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-308464-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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