Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 272 pages
• Published by: Picador April 1, 2000
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0312253990
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0312253998
• Book Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 8.8 ounces

Product Review
The late Walker Percy's mordant contribution to the self-help book craze of the 1980s deals with the heavy abstraction of the Western mind and speculates about why writers may be the most abstracted and least grounded of all. (Before taking up novel writing, Percy was a medical doctor who became a patient in the very institution where he had worked.) The book disappeared for a time. Now it's back in print. Take the quizzes in it, then take a walk--you need to be back in the world before you write another word. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Review
"A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke; a chapbook to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess."--Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Original and imaginative, it conveys a serious, occasionally somber message in a vein of high comedy. I love this book. It is not to be read once through, but to be reread, savored, and pondered."--Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal

"This is a stunningly innovative collection, for readers who like both to chuckle and to think hard."--People
-- Review

Reader Reviews
One of the five subtitles of this impossibly good book reads: "How it is possible for the man who designed Voyager 19, which arrived at Titania, a satellite of Uranus, three seconds off schedule and a hundred yards off course after a flight of six years, to be one of the most screwed-up creatures in California-or the Cosmos" This book defies description. Dr. Percy is unrelenting in forcing the reader to examine the disasters visited upon man through our almost universal refusal to acknowledge our nature, despite the high level of "self-awareness" present in what Percy describes as "the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century." Although this "self-help" book offers nothing in the way of answers, you will feel after reading (and re-reading (and re-reading)) it that you have been let in on the greatest inside joke of all time. This book is not chicken soup-it will not give you a set of instructions for living or boost your "self-esteem," but it will stun you with Dr. Percy's simple brilliance and it will alter the way you watch the evening news (and Donahue/Springer), cut your grass, shop for groceries, and generally manage to survive another Tuesday afternoon. Percy also offers a concise, thoughtful examination of semiotics, a critical study of the nature of human language which he wanted to devote himself to through his novels and non-fiction, although this material does nothing to dilute the potency of the diabolically simple, yet unanswerable, "quizzes" and "thought experiments." If you are one of those who has ever wondered about how everything started getting horribly off track (including, most importantly, ourselves) about the time that Star Trek reruns stopped regularly appearing on non-cable broadcast stations every weeknight, read this book immediately.