WITH THIS GIFT: The Story of Edgar Cayce

If you could believe this pious fictionalized biography, which begins with a 13-year-old Edgar dizzy with visions among the willow trees, you too might share the amazement of doctors at the medical knowledge, uncanny diagnosis, and successful though unconventional cures effected by Cayce in the healing trances ticked off here. Indeed, the seer often amazed himself, as when he began speaking in foreign languages his waking self didn't know. Bewildered by his gift, reluctant at first to use it and even more reluctant to profit from it, Neimark's Cayce comes across as a passive vehicle of the universal unconscious, his every waking move directed by one or another of a series of associates who exploit his trances for their gain--or, more rarely, try to help him attain the goal of a Cayce hospital. But neither Neimark's unquestioning reverence nor her sappy fictionalization invites credulity, and her wan characterization inspires no respect for the prophet.