The whiny testament of a former US Army officer who, after a stint of inner-space spying for covert agencies, turned on his erstwhile masters in a belated burst of moral outrage and was effectively cashiered. The third generation of his family to pursue a military career, Morehouse became a model soldier. While on maneuvers with the Rangers in Jordan, however, the author stopped an errant machine-gun round. His helmet saved him, but he soon began having vivid out-of-body experiences and visions. Morehouse was steered by the psychologist he consulted into a hush-hush project funded by the CIA. At his new duty station the apprentice psychic developed his gift for remote viewing; this extrasensory faculty allows him to move (in something very like a fugue state) backward or forward through time and gather information while doing so. On his travels in the ether, the author claims to have ``seen'' Iraqis place canisters near blazing oil wells, which purportedly released slow- acting toxins to poison UN Coalition troops during the Persian Gulf conflict. Morehouse also asserts that he observed the kidnapping and murder by Arab terrorists of a USMC colonel in Beirut, helped track the terrorists who blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland, and identified couriers transporting contraband drugs across US borders. Ultimately revolted by the allegedly nefarious (but undisclosed) uses to which remote viewing had been put, the author resolved to go public with his complaints. Even now, Morehouse professes amazement at the lengths to which the military would go to protect the secrecy of a highly classified project and shock at the realization that his beloved army was prepared to court-martial him on trumped-up charges. A very different sort of war story, one that not only strains credulity but also begs rather a lot of questions about the scientific validity of paranormal visitations along what Morehouse presents as a sort of mental Internet.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14708-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
A group of really smart women give astute readings of the Bible that, for the most part, subscribe to neither religious nor feminist orthodoxies. Happily, what Daphne Merkin, in her irreverent and surprising reading of The Song of Songs, calls the ``contemporary jargon- infused orthodox-feminist redactor...er, reader'' is virtually absent here. The 28 contributors to this volume are Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic, and they offer varied (and sometimes provocatively conflicting) insights into characters and events in the Old Testament. They are most successful when, in the best tradition of biblical interpretation, they fill in the gaps in the sometimes spare narrative, closely questioning the motives and morals of the actors (male and female, human and divine) and uncovering the messages embedded in the text. The pieces range from the personal (e.g., Rebecca Goldstein's urgent childhood quest to know why Lot's wife looked back), to the rigorously analytical (e.g., Ilana Pardes's structuralist paralleling of the sibling strife between Rachel and Leah with that between Jacob and Esau), to the political (e.g., Patricia J. Williams links Pharaoh's daughter saving the baby Moses, and thus thwarting the attempted genocide of the Jews, with contemporary questions of race, family, government intrusion into reproductive issues). BÅchmann, a doctoral candidate in English literature (Univ. of California, Berkeley), refrains from the modern impulse to condemn Isaiah's portrait of God as ``savage and extravagant''; Lore Segal accepts the contradictions of a God who often changes his mind (``how else could one God encompass everything?''). Among the few less convincing entries are attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of biblical bad girl Delilah (by Fay Weldon, who seems to have little use for the Bible altogether) and Putnam senior editor Spiegel's evaluation of Queen Esther and her predecessor, Vashti, as feminist role models. A rewarding anthology by women who take the Bible seriously and on its own terms, as a literary, ethical, and spiritual expression.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-449-90692-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
Despite its two-column, textbookish format, an unpedantic survey by a self-described ``dreamworker'' of how dreams have been regarded throughout history, with emphasis on the author's own experiences during 30 years of investigation into ``clear- seeing at night.'' The former director of the Sleep and Dream Laboratory at the University of Virginia Medical School, Van de Castle (who will be featured in a Discovery Channel series, ``Dreams,'' in August) argues ardently and articulately that dreams are a proper subject of scientific research. He engages the reader immediately with lots of anecdotes about dreams that have inspired military and spiritual leaders, artists, and scientists. He looks briefly at views of dreams in early civilizations, when their interpretation was the province of shamans and priests, and then moves briskly on to the 19th and 20th centuries and the ideas of Freud, Jung, Adler, and a dozen or so others. Dreams have been regarded by some as the reflection of unconscious needs and by others as merely responses to sensory stimuli. Van de Castle, however, sees them as a source of creative power that should be tapped to improve the course of human history. He reports on recent research into paranormal, prodromal (i.e., diagnostic), and lucid (i.e., conscious) dreams, describes his own studies of the dreams of women during menstruation and pregnancy, and responds vigorously to those who have questioned the validity of his telepathic-dream research. Likely to provoke similar questions is his account of ``dream helper'' ceremonies, in which a group of telepathic dreamers—whom he refers to as ``midnight swimmers in a common cosmic sea''—dream collectively about a target person's problem and help find solutions to it. For those eager to explore the land of dreams this is an amiable guide, with lots of leads on how to get more deeply involved; skeptics, however, will not be persuaded. (Book-of-the- Month alternate selection/Quality Paperback main selection)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-36435-X
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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