MEDICINE POWER

Steiger has thus far written on UFOs, ESP, the lost continent of Atlantis, reincarnation and every other sort of psychic phenomenon, so that Indian medicine power is right up his spooked alley. "Medicine" here isn't limited to the arts of healing; it includes clairvoyance, precognition and the control of weather elements as in the rain dance which Steiger contends "properly practiced, does most certainly provoke the fall of rain." The book is a ghostly hodgepodge of paeans to the Great Spirit, interviews with medicine men of various tribes from Sun Bear the Chippewa to Roiling Thunder the Shoshone, smatterings of anthropology, and whelming pronouncements that the Amerindians, dead or alive, will teach the arrogant White Man about humanhood, ecology, and "the mystical transcendental experience inside everyone." Already American youth, especially the hippies, are rejecting the "dross of materialism" in favor of Indian spiritual values. Well-intentioned, credulous nonsense.