Customer Reviews

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help

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I admire Walker Percy greatly. He was a talented writer who could make the most absurd characters and situations seem real, and who could effortlessly capture the peculiarities of life. However, "Lost in the Cosmos - The Last Self-Help Book" is a huge departure from Walker's fiction. Granted, while his style is evident throughout and the writing evinces his same intellectual musings on the world and religion, it is not a book that actually offers much help. At times oddly funny, "Lost in the Cosmos" winds up as a strange mish-mash of fiction and science.

"Lost in the Cosmos" begins with a "Preliminary Short Quiz", which the author claims if you can answer all of the questions, then you are not lost and need not read the book. Percy arranges the questions by painting a unique scenario and offering different thought experiments from which the reader should choose an answer. As one cannot possibly answer all of the questions, one must take the twenty question quiz, otherwise known as reading the rest of the book. This same format follows throughout, but is fleshed out into shomething like a short story in the last two chapters. Percy does a commendable job in raising questions about how humans perceive themselves in this world and what they think their place might be. Sometimes he does this using humor, but oftentimes there is probably too much scientific data and terminology that is likely to put off some readers.

As this was published in 1984, many of Percy's references, especially to movies and popular culture, are dated. Unlike the majority of self-help books, Percy does not offer trite explanations, mantras, or answers for life's biggest questions. The best part of this book is that the author allows readers to ponder out answers to these questions for themselves, which some people may not find helpful. The problem is that in the end, not much is memorable about "Lost in the Cosmos"; it is as if the author himself got lost along the way and became more interested in the possible sci-fi like "what ifs" than what can be known for sure.