ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S WORLD OF STRANGE POWERS

by John & Simon Welfare Fairley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 23, 1985

The strangest thing about this compendium is the title: why call it ""Arthur C. Clarke's"" when his contribution amounts to all of 15 pages? Well, maybe to establish the suggestio falsi that any enterprise the Great Man would lend his name to must be scientific, analytical, and stimulating. It's not. The bits actually by Clarke (a few off-the-cuff musings slotted in as preface and epilogue) are feeble, and the book itself is uninspired--a lavishly produced assemblage of bumf on the usual paranormal topics, with lots of color illustrations and no point of view. Each topic is covered via a hodgepodge of factoids and anecdotes which supposedly give the reader the ""evidence"" for and against. Do ghosts exist? Telly Savalas got a lift from one, he says. . .between 1889 and 1892, 17,000 people answered a questionnaire from the London Society for Psychical Research and 1,684 of them said they'd seen apparitions. . .in 1965 Porter City, Indiana, farmers were angry when ghost hunters trampled their crops. Poltergeists? A German lawyer's office had trouble in '67. . .and there was a case on the Rhine in 858, and one in Sumatra in 1903. . .a supposed poltergeist in Cambridgeshire turned out to be the faulty air-relief sewer valve. . in '82 The National Enquirer ran a story about a poltergeist in Belize. And so on through hexes, clairvoyance, telekinesis, telepathy, stigmatics, firewalking, dowsing, spiritualism, and reincarnation. It reads like a clippings file--not surprisingly, since much of the material has been culled from the popular press of the last 100 years. Still, if you like this kind of stuff, there's certainly plenty of it here. Good for browsing, but don't expect any coherent thought.

Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1985

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1985

Categories: NONFICTION