[On a reading of] Academia Nuts, I am forced to the critical conclusion that Charles R. Larson … has been drinking coffee laced with rum. He needs to be warned away from that stuff; it is dangerous….

[This] is a very funny book that will get handed around every English department in the country with chortles and snickers and the occasional howl of glee. What I hope is that its public is not that limited, that everyone who has ever had to write An Interpretation of a Literary Work, or everyone who has ever shaken his head, bemused, at the number of academically certified readings that can be hauled out of a book by Freudians, Jungians, Marxists, and Structuralists will find joy in watching Professor Larson avenge them.

Bud Foote, "The Sole in Oedipean Tragedy: Laughing Through English Lit," in The National Observer, June 6, 1977, p. 19.