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?
Rating: 
Summary: An apocalyptic vision of civil war in 1960's in the South.
Review: Walker Percy wrote this book from his bed in a sanitorium in Louisiana. This book certainly reads that way. It is a no-holds-barred, account of Dr. Tom More, a rich white bachelor, who finds humor in the face of a race war at his home on an all-white county club in the suburbs of New Orleans. Dr. More walks a fine line between sanity and insanity, and love and lust. He also is tormented by the physical danger from sniper's bullets from radical African-Americans who lurk in the swamps surrounding his home. The book was written in the 1960's, and Walker Percy was influenced by the civil rights riots that engulfed the US's cities. Mr. Percy could have written a serious novel about civil rights like William Styron's Diary of Frederick Douglas. However, he has chosen to tell the story from the unique perspective of a male white doctor. The doctor finds humor in this apocalytic nightmare, and he nearly finds love. Love is also a big theme of the book. Dr. More discovers "love in the ruins" in the form of a young cello-vertuoso college student among other females. His description of his seducing two women in an abandoned, sniper-infested, gutted Howard Johnson's is one of the book's best. I recommend this book to everyone and as well as Norman Mailer's An American Dream for its similar genius.
Rating: 
Summary: Funny. Perceptive. Prophetic.
Review: What a wreck are Catholics in America.
Men in love with their loins demand the Church bless their private demons. Men in love with their country demand the Church endorse consumerism and pre-emptive war. That the left puts their passions before their Faith is hardly news. But Percy also recognizes an Americanist tendency among members of the Catholic right; although this might be a bit of the pot calling the kettle black since Percy may have a criticism or two of his own for the contemplative life.
Are Americans too proud, too disobedient, and too narcissistic to ever be good Catholics? Is this a modern malaise, or is it who we have always been? Will the sickness noted by Orestes Brownson, and battled by Pope Leo XIII, and forgotten by most in the following century be always with us? Who knows? But we're unlikely to exorcise this demon any time soon. So what can we do? Maybe get back to metaphysics. And maybe read a few good books by Walker Percy. Of which this is one. Better than the Moviegoer, but certainly worse than Lancelot. Right-wing orthodox Catholic monarchists will find a few things not to their liking. But when don't they.
This is Percy, so be aware that there are a few nagoy cheenas showing off their groodies to drooling vecks looking for the old in-out-in-out. But you can't capture the displacement of modern man without at least acknowledging his bestial sexuality.
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