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Title: OVERRATED
Review: I don't really care for chatty writers, and Pirsig likes to palaver on like it's nobody's business. Just get to the point and back it up with facts. The first time I read Zen was when I was teaching college at the time it was published. There was a lot of buzz going around about the book. Some profs were assigning Zen to their students, while almost everyone was praising it as the book of the century. So I had to read it. It didn't live up to the hype. There's nothing really deep or novel here unless you're a fan of syncretism, in this case the meshing of Eastern thought with Western thought. It's my view that both are mutually exclusive, and that any attempt to combine them dilutes both of them. But I'm biased. I'll take the Greeks, Augustine, Aquinas and the rest of the Western tradition any day.
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