Rating: 
Summary: Not bad
Review: But could have been a bit more engaging. The begining was pretty slow and just not captivating enough for my taste. Percy is a great writer, however, this is an example of his masterful writing style.
Rating:
Summary: Not bad
Review: But could have been a bit more engaging. The begining was pretty slow and just not captivating enough for my taste. Percy is a great writer, however, this is an example of his masterful writing style.
Rating: 
Summary: Mind food for these dark days
Review: I always considered Walker Percy our greatest living writer until his death in 1990, and now there is that rather messy problem of figuring where he fits in the cosmic scheme of things. That problem would make him smile no doubt. Philosopher, physician, scientist, and moralist, he brings remarkable depth to this parable of clinical depression set in a time when America has lost its greatness, perhaps from internal decay or perhaps external attack. There are passages here that strike home with too much realism since the horrors of September 11. The protagonist, Dr. Tom More, sets out to restore balance to the human soul through his remarkable invention, the Ontological Lapsometer. But is this the quest of a madman or a savior? There is an altogether too eerie prescience in the opening pages, and while one should not expect Nostradamus, consider these lines: "These are bad times. "Principalities and powers are everywhere victorious. Wickedness flourishes in high places. "There is a clearer and more present danger, however. for I have reason to believe that within the next two hours an unprecedented fallout of noxious particles will settle hereabouts and perhaps in other places as well." Grab this book and fill your glass to the brim with crushed ice and whatever distilled spirit you favor. But if you notice the vines growing across your windows, you might want to get the shears or perhaps refill your glass. Either way, you will be hooked by this book, a real treasure of American literature.
Rating:
Summary: falls apart in the end
Review: It starts of well enough, but gets pretty tired for the last hundred pages. It was as if Percy got sick of writing it. However, it's not totally devoid of the normal philosophical gems. If you're a huge Percy fan, you'll have to get around to reading it anyway, but I'd rather go with the Moviegoer.
Rating:
Summary: The funniest book I've ever read.
Review: Maybe it's best to start with what this book is not about. It's not about race. Or at least it's not about race to the extent that a Southern writer in the 60's could write about other things. True Walker Percy fans are a highly intellectual, serious crowd; he's one of the few American existentialists who can compare with the Europeans (John Updike?). For that reason, most of the Percy crowd doesn't really love this book. It's too funny. I, however, am not really an existentialist, and did not really enjoy (although I did respect) his more famous books, like the Moviegoer or the Last Gentleman. This book was like reading a legitimately highbrow John Irving novel.
Rating:
Summary: You will laugh, you'll cry, you'll love this book
Review: OK, maybe you won't cry. I do promise that you will love this book. The humor is rich and taunt, Percy gives no room for you to drift inside a unrealistic but enjoyable setting. He paints a great picture of the end. ( it's rather comical, yet disturbing). Please read with a slow gin fiz. I know I did.
Rating:
Summary: You will laugh, you'll cry, you'll love this book
Review: OK, maybe you won't cry. I do promise that you will love this book. The humor is rich and taunt, Percy gives no room for you to drift inside a unrealistic but enjoyable setting. He paints a great picture of the end. ( it's rather comical, yet disturbing). Please read with a slow gin fiz. I know I did.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding audio version
Review: This is one of those books I've been meaning to read for years, and I finally got around to it when I listened to a borrowed audio book version - and I'm glad I waited because Tom Parker's performance is brilliant. This is both a wickedly funny satire and a moving parable of spiritual life; a rollicking celebration of life and a parable of clinical depression. No wonder it has a following. Wow! One thing that is really neat about reading this book at this late date is that it becomes a sort of alternate-universe story. Written in the Sixties, it brings all that back but in a strange way because it's set closer to our time - but in a different reality where many things developed along different lines. It's interesting to see how much some things have changed, and how much other things have remained the same. I know the point of the book was not to predict the future, but Mr. Percy succeeded anyway sometimes and it's kind of fun. This book is a real treat, in a lot of different ways. It has an amazingly varied cast of characters who range from lunacy to wisdom, sometimes in the same sentence, with many layers of irony laid on - and Parker expresses this all and more in a most entertaining fashion. I don't care now if I ever read the book in print, but I plan to buy this audio version so that I can enjoy the book -and Parker's performance - again in future years. Bravo, Walker Percy for writing this marvellous book which will only get better with time and bravo, Tom Parker, for bringing it to life.
Rating:
Summary: societal fragmentation, angelism/bestialism, psychotherapy
Review: Walker Percy died over a decade ago, leaving a small but dedicated readership. A dilettante whose interests ran from medicine and psychiatry (Percy was an M. D.) to semiotics, philosophy, and religion, we remember Percy for his slightly cantankerous (but never malicious) outlook on modernity and the human condition. "Love in the Ruins," written in '71, imagines a U.S.A. in which prevalent (and sometimes contradictory) trends run to their illogical extremes -- political association becomes fragmented to the point of neo-tribalism, mainline churches become secularized to the point of banality or fixated to the point of intolerance, and psychological treatment grows increasing manipulative. Into this world he drops Dr. Tom More, "bad Catholic" and the inventor of the Ontological Lapsometer. The Lapsometer measures the degree to which a soul has fallen, the degree of estrangement and alienation it has attained. One particular sickness it detects is angelism/bestialism -- the tendency to go from spirit-like abstraction to animal appetite with little moderation. Like all technologies, the Lapsometer becomes a means of social and spiritual manipulation, and Dr. More and his device set in play a story that leads the world to the brink of apocalypse. By turns desperate and hilarious, this readable novel holds up well today. I also recommend "Lost in the Cosmos," which contains many of the same ideas, but in more of a tragi-comic essay form.
Rating:
Summary: peculiar?
Review: Walker Percy is a great writer and thinker (ie., Thanatos Syndrome & Lost In The Cosmos) but I must say I just couldn't relate to this particular peculiar book. Honestly, I read it all, and kept waiting, waiting for something... at the end I was disappointed. I could not get into the armageddonish or rather apocalyptic mode of this book... it takes place in the future which is actually the past though? Help me, please. I honestly kept thinking that one has to be from the deep south (of the U.S.A.) to fully appreciate the racial things that are going on in the book... and since I'm not, I want to be fair and say the book is O.K. Percy rocks, but in this particular case, he did not rock MY world? Maybe I need a Lapsometer treatment?
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