Ebook Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by Walker Percy
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Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by Walker Percy
Ebook Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by Walker Percy
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Walker Percy's mordantly funny and wholly original contribution to the self-help book craze deals with the Western mind's tendency toward heavy abstraction. This favorite of Percy fans continues to charm and beguile readers of all tastes and backgrounds. Lost in the Cosmos invites us to think about how we communicate with our world.
- Sales Rank: #67947 in Books
- Published on: 2000-04-01
- Released on: 2000-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.14" h x .77" w x 5.52" l, .54 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Amazon.com 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.
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
About the Author
Walker Percy wrote several books, many of them bestsellers, and is considered one of the greatest American writers of our time. He died in 1990.
Most helpful customer reviews
45 of 45 people found the following review helpful.
Lost in the Cosmos
By J. Leahy
Imagine a young man, freshly graduated from a mediocre State College. He studied music, or painting, or sociology, i.e. something a bit idealistic in ambition but rather quite useless to him in actual practice. He is in a used bookstore in a large Northeastern Metropolis and comes across a book entitled, "Lost in the Cosmos". He is intrigued. He flips intently through the book to ascertain if the little money he has to his name should be used to buy it. Certainly the title speaks to him. He, too, feels lost--maybe not "in the cosmos" so much but certainly in his own general vicinity. Nonetheless, little of the book quite makes sense to him. Let's face it, he wants to *stop* feeling lost, not go further into this awful feeling. He wants an answer, one that he can understand. He wants to be found, dammit! So, he puts the book down and moves on.
Twenty years later the man--now, alas, not so young--has been reading the novels of Walker Percy, e.g. "Love in the Ruins", or "Lancelot" and is reminded of "Lost in the Cosmos". He finally orders it online. After two decades of self-loathing masquerading as inflated notions of self-worth; after a lifetime of so many bad choices followed by even worse choices (punctuated by some really monumentally bad choices bordering on the comical) he finally reads the book.
He starts to get it, or so he hopes. The book explains his own life so brilliantly, not just his to be sure, but virtually everyone he knows. It is so pitch-perfect in laying out the dilemma of the free-floating, postmodern, nihilistic, autonomous self--and the various attempts to overcome this empty nothing we feel ourselves to be--that he is finally stunned into silence. More than anything else he finds this silence compelling. A choice is required. One that he has been studiously avoiding his entire life. He is lost in the cosmos--he always had been--but now, thank God, he finally knows it.
Do you:
A) Dismiss this review as the self-inflated pomp that it actually is and instead purchase something more entertaining or perhaps watch an episode of your favorite show on the internet? Nothing wrong with a little diversion, is there?
B) Buy the book and find out for yourself just exactly how lost you are?
Choose one.
56 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
BULLSEYE
By Micah Newman
Walker Percy is very much a modern-day Pascal, in that he is wrapped up in the project of waking up modern man from his numb, jaded, over-entertained stupor into realizing what a predicament he is in. It's an existentialist concern, in the Christian-existentialist sense of Kierkegaard, especially insofar as both Percy and the Melancholy Dane are obsessed with the problem of subjectivity, and our awareness of it, and the paltry ways we try, unsuccessfully, to transcend it.
So, this is NOT really a humor/satire book, per se, although the dust jacket's description tries to bill it as such (perhaps to expand the market appeal? Feh!). Early on, though, there is a send-up of the Phil Donahue show that is just *hilarious*. Most of the book is a series of (fairly involved) rhetorical questions, about such things as who in a hypothetical situation you would identify with the most, and why. The way the questions are counterposed, one could accuse Percy of making his points backhandedly via strawman-demolition, but that would be beside the point. Percy's overall aim is to get at the background of all our operating assumptions, and the ways in which we judge and evaluate others in relation to self, and what that says about what kind of thing man is.
In the middle of the book is a digression on semiotics, the theory of signs. One of Percy's central ideas here is that man's cardinal innovation over other animals is his use of signs and not just signals. The "sign" usage is essentially triangular, involving subject, object, and the intersubjective sign, whereas an animal "signal" is two-dimensional, such as "danger, run away." All of our thought and communication is predicated on that sign-based three-dimensional framework. The self constantly has to situate oneself with respect to other selves and in the intersubjective framework that marks our communicative network.
The main human predicament is that that intersubjective framework is essentially unstable due to our confusion about ourselves, and our desire to cover up our insecurities. No solution to this problem is forced upon the reader, although some suggestion of one is implied. The humanist and religious outlooks are both presented, fairly, I think, and the reader is left to evaluate the human condition as portrayed.
The book ends with a couple of arresting sci-fi scenarios, that for thought-provocation, I haven't seen since the likes of Arthur C. Clarke's _Childhood's End._ This is a no-holds-barred look at ourselves that is rewarding as it is unflinchingly realistic, and I highly recommend it.
27 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Lost in the Cosmos: Essential 21st Cen. Reading
By Merl Ledford III
Walker Percy was a practicing MD who contracted TB, moved to a warm, dry climate to heal and never looked back. His works sparkle with analytical diagnosis of societal illnesses we all carry. A devout Roman Catholic, Dr. Percy would call that sickness "sin" and see it as an infection we both invent for ourselves and that's been spread to us by others. We become vectors for disease. And at the core of all such infections he sees moral relativism ("Does it meet my needs") as the chief cause. The cure he points out in his "Last Self-Help Book" is accepting a moral absolute ("Is it Right"). He sees that as a hard but ultimately satisfying way to live in the final chapter of the book. But instead of taking away the reader's right to choose as a free moral agent, Dr. Percy gives opposing scenarios: "Do you like this or that? Choose (a) or (b)."
This is a must read for everyone who is sick of the "you owe it to yourself" crap Madison Ave. plays off of to sell us things we don't need and really don't want. This is a must read for right-wingers who think everyone must agree with them or go to Hell; it is equally a must read for liberal elitists who think they can (and have the right to by virtue of special class &/or educations) make moral choices that Dr. Percy believes belong solely to individuals.
If you are searching, buy and read (and re-read) this book.
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