The Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

Book Overview

Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time. The cult classic that can still change your life . . . Let the dice decide This is the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0006513905
• ISBN13: 9780006513902
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 500 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

If I Throw a 6 I'll Give This Book 5 Stars

Shocking, revelatory, hilarious and pornographic novel about a square New York psychiatrist who turns a dice tossing experiment into a lifestyle and ultimately a revolutionary movement. A self-confessed unreliable memoir with the tart flavour of 1970's hippie, free-love (sex sex sex), anti-establishment ethos (you can just sense Nixon in the background). It may not, as the cover claims, change your life but the odds are you will never look at a die the same way again. Luke Rhinehart shares a literary cell with Fight Club's Tyler Durden. You decide whether it should be padded.

Seems tame now . . .

This is a classic subversive book from the early 70s, banned in several countries (but I managed to smuggle it into South Africa).There are strong links to the anti-psychiatry sentiments of the time, but it's not a book to be taken literally, and definitely not as a guide for sensible living.It's funny, outrageous and moving. It's a catalyst for deeper-than-normal thought. It'll always have a cult following.If you don't read "The Diceman", your life will be poorer for it.

Dicy

As usual, the dice said I should tell you what I thought about this book. There are several me's, and each one has a different opinion, or at least would like to say some things to you. So I take a pen and a piece of paper and write down the options. If I roll...1-4) I play around a little, and say this book was terrible, no explanations. There's that little part of me that likes to do a few pranks. 1 star.5-6) I choose to take a civilized and wannabe-pro approach and use a lot of difficult words describing how intelligent and witty The Dice Man was. 5 stars.7-17) I say that I really loved this book. I go to the extremities and use a whole lotta superlatives and exclamation marks. It was hilarious at most times, and thought-provoking at all times. The thing about giving your every side a chance to live it's life, to deliberately submit to a sort of a schitzophrenia being a good thing...interesting, most interesting. 5 stars, absolutely! 18-29) I take a very dice man-ish approach and choose to tell you my opinion on this book by describing the selection process. 5 stars.30-32) I give up and never say an opinion on The Dice Man.33) I "accidentally" write about a wrong book.34-35) I write my review always one key stroke to the right. Q is W, W is E, E is R and so on.36) I write my review in the same manner as described in one part of the The Dice Man.Then I take two green dice, say a little prayers for the Die and throw them. 21. The Dice have ruled that I should write about my decision-making experience.Although I'm here violating the laws of all uncertainty, I'd suggest you don't leave whether you read this novel or not to the whims of the dice. It might open up many doors. And change your life.Or offer a new way of having fun, at least. 1) Read it. 2) Read it. 3) Read it twice. 4) Read it. 5) Read it. 6) Read it.

A cult classic!

This is the book about Luke Rhinehart, he's in his thirties and tired of his life and the everyday routines "life is islands of extacy in an ocean of boredom, and when you reach your thirties you rarely see land...", one evening, after a poker evening with some of his collegues, when the collegues has left he finds a dice is missing, it's hidden under a card in the bookshelves, he believes, if this indeed is the dice and it shows the snake-eye I will go downstairs and rape Arlene, he thinks for himself. He lifts the card and finds the dice showing...the snake-eye. Thus The Dice Man is born, he starts letting the dice making all decicions for him. The first chapters in the book he describes what goes on in the mind of a depressed person, and he does it in a great way, you can't read these chapters without feeling some amount of recognition, though, after the first dice is thrown the homour takes over, and the book in a way looses some of the initial touch, though it's still great. This is concidered a cult classic, and is actually one of the few that holds for that pressure, for instance the british band Earthling is inspired by this book and uses "the dice technique" for writing their lyrics, for me this is a must-read