Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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.)