Rating: 
Summary: Dialouge and deadpan that leave your head spinning...
Review: I know the term 'best ever' is thrown out there too often and is in most cases downright cliche. But with this book, funniest book ever is an understatement. If you're a fan of deadpan, dry humor with witty dialouge and eccentric characters this book is for you. The first 50 pages are a bit slow in setting up the rest of the story, but from then on I was hanging on every sentence, not wanting it to end.
The character of Austin Popper is one of the most eccentric, off the wall, and laugh out loud characters ever written. Let me put in the analogy of a movie. If you liked 'Royal Tennenbaums', this book is right up your alley. It has that kind of dry, acidic wit and tongue in cheek humor. If you're more of an 'American Pie' kind of person, you may be left scratching your head and wondering what the hell just happened.
Rating:
Summary: Me, too!
Review: I, too, think this this one of the very funniest books I've ever read. Portis is a master of comic invention: there are whole pages given over to strings of hilarious jokes. He can't stop! His best technique is his dialogue: a little like 30's film scripts, sometimes like Thomas Berger...but very original. Did I say funny?
Rating:
Summary: Better than a Sears catalog
Review: In the past few months I've read On the Road, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Catch-22... and this book ranks 2nd. It's catchy, fun, and truly different than the junk you can easily pick up elsewhere. Do yourself a favor and discover Portis.
Rating:
Summary: "Must" reading for all Charles Portis fans!
Review: In this thoroughly entertaining Charles Portis novel, Lamar Jimmerson is a member of the modern-day Gnomon Society, an international fraternal order dedicated to preserving the arcane wisdom of the lost city of Atlantis. While stationed in France in 1917, Jimmerson comes across the "Codex Pappus", a small but sacred Gnomonic book crammed with Atlantean puzzled, Egyptian riddles, and extended alchemical metaphors. Soon basking in the lore of lost Atlantis, Jimmerson is convinced that his mission on earth is to administer and expand the ranks of this noble brotherhood. Masters Of Atlantis takes us through Jimmerson's publication of the Gnomonic texts, a scandalous schism that rocks the Gnomonic community, his disastrous bid for the governorship of Indiana, and a fateful gathering of Gnomons in the mobile-home park of East Texas. "Must" reading for all Charles Portis fans, Masters Of Atlantis is memorable, rollicking, fascinating journey into an America of misfits, conmen, oddballs, and innocents.
Rating:
Summary: Master of the Deadpan
Review: MASTERS OF ATLANTIS is quite simply the funniest novel I've ever read, and it's a crime that is has not been in continuous publication since it was first released in 1985. Though MASTERS, which chronicles the rise and fall of a secret society, is full of absurdities -- men who wear tall cone-shaped hats called Pomas; a talking blue-jay named Squanto; one man's plan to win World War II using compressed air -- Portis himself is not an absurdist. He's a master of deadpan humor with timing as dead-on as the best of Mark Twain. Yet beneath the humor of this novel is a portrait of the American Dream turned upside-down, a twentieth-century America full of desperate and lonely people, many of whom pursue fruitless get-rich-quick schemes and turn to secret societies to fill the voids in their lives. One of the many triumphs of MASTERS OF ATLANTIS is that despite this grim undercurrent the humor never lags. With any luck, more readers will discover the work of Charles Portis, whose vision is as hilarious and individual as you're likely to find in the 20th century's last half.
Rating: 
Summary: boring
Review: Not what I expected. Just boring and slow. Not funny at all. Satire, well yes but boring. Gee, go to the dentist and have all your teeth removed it would be more fun than this.
Rating:
Summary: Don't laugh, it's all TRUE!!!
Review: Portis sees deeply into the American psyche, and the results are hilarious. Conspiracy theories, weird new religions, rampant materialism disguised as spirituality, extreme personal behavior, self-delusion masquerading as philosphy and history--it's all here. And yet the novel is compassionate, even tender. What a wide open, goofily free nation this is. We here in the USA are uncontrollably eccentric, maybe even just plain nuts: but we wouldn't have it any other way.
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Summary: Kooky Cults Without the Kool-Aid
Review: The predilection of humans to involve themselves in cults is a perplexing topic that requires years of study and stacks of dictionary-sized psychology books in order to understand.
Or...
...you can just read Masters of Atlantis then move on to your degree. Charles Portis continues to hold me in awe with his deadpan comic genius. His silly plots read humorously on the surface, and move at a good clip, but suddenly one realizes that there is so very, very much more going on.
Where do cults come from and why do (presumably) rational people involve themselves in the nutty things? Portis' take on the topic spells it out in plain humor: an accidental encounter, an impressionable young man, the hangers on, the manipulators, and, gasp, the true believer who spawns a whole philosophy derived from the antics of a con man. Strangely enough, he begins to discern subtle truths about the nature of the universe. When the government gets involved things get sillier yet, but don't just write this off as fiction, we've all seen Congressional hearings; Charles Poris has got their number.
Line your Charles Portis books up next to your Kurt Vonnegut-they make great companions.
Rating:
Summary: Dialouge and deadpan that leave your head spinning...
Review: this book is one of my favorites ever. i just love how portis's accounting is so detached and even-handed, while what and whom he writes about are so absurd and pathetic. because portis doesn't try to write funny, the reader can absorb the outrageousness situations and dialogs in pure form. and those situations and dialogs are a riot. small caveat:
while a lot of events happen, these characters never really grow or learn from the disasters they leave in their wake. there's no redemption or closure. although it spans decades, this book truly goes nowhere. if you can't handle that, you won't like masters of atlantis.
Rating:
Summary: sadly, the real cult is us portis fans
Review: this book is one of my favorites ever. i just love how portis's accounting is so detached and even-handed, while what and whom he writes about are so absurd and pathetic. because portis doesn't try to write funny, the reader can absorb the outrageousness situations and dialogs in pure form. and those situations and dialogs are a riot. small caveat:
while a lot of events happen, these characters never really grow or learn from the disasters they leave in their wake. there's no redemption or closure. although it spans decades, this book truly goes nowhere. if you can't handle that, you won't like masters of atlantis.
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