One section of the book deals with the problem of depression. There is also a science fiction section involving an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligences. Sometimes it looks like a textbook elsewhere it transitions into a parody of the bygone Phil Donahue Show. The book is filled with quizzes, questionnaires, thought-experiments and diagrams. ‘How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians…’ With a nice blend of irony and earnestness, the theme of his book is indicated at the opening: This same observation applies to Lost in the Cosmos. His fictional work is funny and perceptive but he tends to make his point in roundabout ways. The author, Walker Percy, had already written several critically acclaimed novels one of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award. The full title of this work of nonfiction (published in 1983) is Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.
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