According to Andrew Hoogheem, it is: easily Walker Percy's strangest book. On its surface a darkly humorous parody of the literature of self-help, this late work… runs the reader down a gauntlet of multiple-choice questions… whose cumulative effect is to leave her more bereft of answers than when she began. Along the way it conjures up dialogues between talk show hosts and long-dead theologians, inveigles its readers into seriously contemplating suicide, shoulders in on the debates of academic
semioticians, presents an overview of world history that predicts
World War III erupting as a consequence of Western
anomie, and arrives at its denouement by way of… science fiction stories of nuclear war and alien encounters. The book is a favorite of the philosopher
Peter Kreeft, of
Boston College, and a lecture on the subject appears on his personal website. ==References==