Twenty-eight electroshock treatments were required to bring Pirsig back from the realms beyond Reason where, in hot pursuit of the nature of Quality, he “saw too much.” As a precocious student of chemistry and philosophy and later as a teacher of rhetoric, Pirsig set himself the problem of resolving the dialectical nature of Western thought on its own rational terms (the title of this book notwithstanding), and eventually found himself, strange to say, with a mind divided against itself. Now as a writer of technical manuals and an amateur mechanic, he is trying to heal the schism on a summer motorcycle trip with his high-strung young son who has been diagnosed as having “the beginning symptoms of mental illness.” The journal of their travels is integrated with what he calls the “Chautauqua,” a discourse on the obsessive development of the highly abstract personal philosophy that led to the author’s withdrawal from public reality. From all appearances, Quality still has the upper hand over such mundane matters as paternity – the presence of Aristotle and Plato is more strongly felt than the character of the boy, which remains shadowy. Pirsig’s arguments are as incisive and absorbing as his drastic fate would indicate, and the elements of the story hang together in a reified, disturbing autobiography of a body/mind duality incarnate.
Pub Date: April 15, 1974
ISBN: 0060839872
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The freshest, most elegantly written of the new books about the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls (see Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 1107, The Hidden Scrolls, p. 1108). In this very thorough study, Golb (Jewish History and Civilization/Univ. of Chicago) surveys earlier scholarship on the topic and finds it wanting. Almost all of the individuals and groups who have devoted themselves to piecing together and deciphering the scrolls and fragments found between 1947 and 1955 have believed they were written by scribes of the Essene community who lived in the ``monastery'' of Qumran not far from the shores of the Dead Sea. In 1980 Golb advanced his own explanation of the scrolls' origins: Qumran was not a monastery but a fortress, he argued, and the scrolls represent the remnants of the libraries of Jerusalem's various Jewish sects, who, in order to preserve their manuscripts from the Roman conquerors in the first century a.d., hid these religious and literary treasures in the Dead Sea area. Backing up his assertions here, Golb makes accessible some very technical material, demystifying the process of manuscript discovery, reconstruction, and decipherment. While many of his academic adversaries have depicted him as an upstart and a professional gadfly, he emerges from this volume as a reasoned, impassioned advocate of a more likely scenario for the concealment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He doesn't spring his solution on us suddenly; he includes the reader in the process by which someone who has been involved in scroll research for the better part of his life, who once accepted the ``Qumran Hypothesis,'' began to see problems with it in the early '70s and eventually developed a compelling alternative. While detailing that process, Golb also chronicles the battles for control of the scrolls' possession and publication, a story that has been told before, though not in such exhaustive detail. The legions of scroll aficionados around the world can now read of conflicts both ancient and modern in a lively and informative new book. (Book-of-the-Month/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selections; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-544395-X
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
An East German psychotherapist explores, in an occasionally affecting way, the experience of living within a totalitarian system. It was a system in which a citizen had to guard his utterances not only outside but inside the home, because parents could not speak too freely in front of children, who might themselves be indiscreet or inadvertently betray them. The individual was required not merely to conform but to show enthusiasm for the system. It was not possible, Maaz writes, ``to escape this personality deformation.'' The East German system used overt force, including torture and arrest, as well as the indirect force of legal insecurity, reprisals, intimidation, indoctrination, and fear. It required one to ``sacrifice emotional spontaneity, all frankness and honesty, as well as [one's] critical faculty,'' even to preserve a ``relatively safe life of subservience.'' Few were able to resist the pressure. Millions participated regularly in huge ``jubilation marches,'' and an estimated half a million citizens were informants of the Stasi, the secret police. It was little wonder that the capacity for independent thought and action became increasingly rare. In describing this process, Maaz is persuasive and, in a book published originally in 1990 in Germany, prescient regarding the difficulties that East Germans would face in adjusting to democracy. When dealing with the more theoretical foundations of a controlled psychological environment he is less convincing, as when he complains about the authoritarian technique of ``forcing children to sit on the potty''; he is even self- contradictory when, discussing his therapeutic work with patients, he describes the act of emigration from East Germany as a ``sadomasochistic defense of their dammed-up aggression.'' And when he fears for a new economic expansion that will ``exacerbate the ecological crisis'' and ``step up the armaments business,'' he is venturing beyond his area of expertise. Like the curate's egg, good in parts.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03364-3
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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