Name: Lost in the Cosmos
Rating: 4.111111111111111 (9 reviews)
ISBN: 9780312253998

Walker Percy

Explores human nature and presents insights on the self and its fears, sexuality, boredom, depression, and other aspects.

The Last Self-Help Book

Lost in the Cosmos

Simon Elliott Stegall

The irony of the self-help genre is that its main function is to provide non-self-originating help those who can't help themselves. Or in rather kinder terms, to "help people who can't help themselves". It is ironic both in the name, "self-help", which is a typically attractive advertising inaccuracy, and in its goal, which is to help the self gain control over some area of its life, rather than help the self know itself in any meaningful way. Percy has written a book to help the self know that it doesn't know itself.

How will Lost In The Cosmos teach you about yourself? By showing you how to ask the right questions, and teaching you how to see the "self" for what it is. What is the self? Read the book and arrive at your own conclusion.

Percy shows us how to think rightly about oneself. This is why the book is so valuable and so superlative compared to the rest of the self-help genre. After reading Lost in the Cosmos, one does not have a desire to read any more self-help; one just wants to get on with being a self. This is a book that allows you to move on to deeper topics like philosophy rather than, like dieting books, perpetuating itself through maddening impotency. That us why the book is subtitled "The Last Self-Help Book."

I give 5 stars and permanent respect to Percy for this book.

Lost in the Cosmos The Last Self-Help Book

Reviews

Highlights