A review by deanna_rigney
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy

4.0

At once ominously serious and flippantly comical, this is probably the only self-help book that gives you rhetorical question after rhetorical question and no answers whatsoever. The reader is forced to think (not a popular topic for most). Percy is an existential guru that haphazardly throws around hypothetical situations that frustrate and cause discomfort. This is not self-help in the glad-handing sentimental tripe model we’ve been presented with most of our lives. If anything you probably come away more confused than ever, but in a good way (trust me). There’s a middle section chock full of semiotics, the theory of signs, which was très interesting, even though I felt I didn’t have the intelligence to make sense of it. My only complaint really was that at times I felt like I was being preached at…Percy does this in a very subtle way. His opinions seem quite crystal in a few parts. I wouldn’t necessarily dislike this if it were the norm throughout, but most of his questions seem to steer clear of an obvious answer, letting the reader make his or her own decisions, so in this way it seems like peer pressure when he does in fact “get preachy.” This was a highly interesting and thought-provoking read despite this one flaw, and it is an existential delight I’d highly recommend.