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Title: Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy ISBN: 0-312-24311-1 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 September, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: societal fragmentation, angelism/bestialism, psychotherapy
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: Mind food for these dark days
Comment: 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: 3
Summary: peculiar?
Comment: 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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Title: The Second Coming : A Novel by Walker Percy ISBN: 0312243243 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 13 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy ISBN: 0375701966 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 14 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Thanatos Syndrome : A Novel by Walker Percy ISBN: 0312243324 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 04 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Lost in the Cosmos : The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy ISBN: 0312253990 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Last Gentleman : A Novel by Walker Percy ISBN: 0312243081 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 04 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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