Brian A Smith - Böcker

In 1962, Walker Percy (1916--1990) made a dramatic entrance onto the American literary scene when he won the National Book Award for fiction with his first novel, The Moviegoer. A physician, philosopher, and devout Catholic, Percy dedicated his life to understanding the mixed and somewhat contradictory foundations of American life as a situation faced by the wandering and won-dering human soul. His controversial works combined existential questioning, scientific investigation, the insight of the southern stoic, and authentic religious faith to produce a singular view of humanity's place in the cosmos that ranks among the best American political thinking.An authoritative guide to the political thought of this celebrated yet complex American author, A Political Companion to Walker Percy includes seminal essays by Ralph C. Wood, Richard Reinsch II, and James V. Schall, S.J., as well as new analyses of Percy's view of Thomistic realism and his reaction to the American pursuit of happiness. Editors Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian A. Smith have assembled scholars of diverse perspectives who provide a necessary lens for interpreting Percy's works. This comprehensive introduction to Percy's "American Thomism" is an indispensable resource for students of American literature, culture, and politics.

Academic interpretations of Neolithic rock motifs and their location within the landscape and on ancient monuments are often thought-provoking, but they invariably shy away from acknowledging the remarkable coherence exhibited by petroglyphs throughout the British Isles. In Mindscapes of Prehistory, Brian A. Smith and Alan A. Walker have taken the arguments they first developed in Rock Art and Ritual: Interpreting the Prehistoric Landscapes of the North York Moors considerably further. They advance a theory that the rock art of the Neolithic belongs to a coherent and cyclical cosmology circumscribed by sunlight and water, birth and death, and argue that the evidence is plain to see for any hillwalker or amateur archaeologist who dares to take an interest. Smith and Walker consider landscapes further afield than the North York Moors, although this region, and Northern England in general, still remains the focus of their investigations. This is a milestone publication, the result of many years of fieldwork, careful observation, research and contemplation; it promises to stimulate debate in this fascinating and understudied subject area for years to come.

Walker Percy is one of America’s great novelists, and he ought to be known as a political thinker as well. In Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer, Brian A. Smith makes the case that we should understand Percy’s novels and essays together as a guide to living in a complex world. Percy cultivated a philosophical and literary approach that revealed the fault lines in the modern mind. He portrayed man as a wayfarer: peristantly unsatisfied and wandering in search of a perfectly complete solution to life’s dilemmas. His writing captures the restlessness of the human heart and allows us to comprehend our temptation to escape our sense of alienation and longing. Drawing ideas from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature, Percy’s multidimensional account of American political life shows the ways that today’s approaches to life often fall short and leave us more unsatisfied with ourselves and others than ever. Percy hoped we would evade the temptations to escape the life of the wayfarer and accept our misplaced longings, alienation, depression, and anxiety as part of the human condition. Failing to do this might lead us to accept ever more extreme political and social ideas as the basis for life. The promise of embracing Percy’s political teaching is that we might then be able to accept ourselves as we really are in order to join with others in authentic community.