Bracing finale to Vallee's ``Alien Contact trilogy'' (Dimensions, 1988; Confrontations, 1990), as the ufologist brings some famous UFO cases down to earth—and into the mud. In Dimensions, Vallee presented his theory that UFOs are probably not spacecraft but manifestations of a consciousness- controlling ``technology'' from ``dimensions beyond spacetime''; in Confrontations, he bolstered that theory with examples from his own casebook. Here, deftly blending theory and memoir, he attempts to clear ufololgy of ``the weeds and the vines of human fantasy and...the poisonous flowers of unbalanced minds.'' That is, to Vallee, cases from the infamous Roswell incident (spacecraft and aliens purportedly captured by the US Army in 1947) to the popular legend of Area 51 (aliens working tentacle-in-hand with US officials beneath the Nevada desert) to the alleged abduction of Franck Fontaine in 1979 (exhaustively researched firsthand by Vallee) to the purported top-secret federal UFO-investigating committee of Howard Blum's Out There (1990) are not only mostly nonsense, but—here's the rub—``complex hoaxes that have been carefully engineered for our benefit.'' But by whom, and why? By federal disinformation agents, and possibly as ``psychological warfare experiments'' or ``as a cover for something else''—i.e., experimental spy/warcraft or real ``flying discs.'' Vallee offers little hard evidence to back those conjectures, but he does unglove the heavy hand of military intelligence in many cases, while at the same time exposing the absurdity of others, including Budd Hopkins's best-selling alien-rape reports. So what's left? A host of genuinely mysterious cases, e.g., the 1989 Soviet Union sightings, and the spirit of rigorous scientific inquiry that Vallee urges they be subjected to. Except for Vallee's wobbly conclusions, a forceful and refreshingly iconoclastic study that, for all its good sense, will likely add up to only a cry in the alien-infested ufowilderness.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-345-37172-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
Michael Lerner has found God, and he wants other alienated progressive Jews to find God, too. Unfortunately, this overlong tome is more likely to put readers to sleep than to awaken them to Jewish spirituality. Who is Lerner's God? ``S/he'' is ``the possibility of possibility,'' that is, the possibility of transformation. Lerner wants to return Judaism to its original revolutionary creed of freedom, equality, and social justice and to its belief that the world must be ``repaired.'' Editor of the progressive journal Tikkun, he convincingly responds to critics who say that Jewish renewal, with its revisions of liturgy and ritual, is inauthentic, by showing how through its history Judaism has undergone a continual process of change. But he is on squishier ground when he draws on psychoanalytic theory. In an almost comical act of biblical interpretation, Lerner explains that Abraham's binding of Isaac for sacrifice was a repetition compulsion, a reenactment of his own father's supposed cruelty to him. Similarly, all oppression and injustice—from slavery to the Holocaust—is reduced to a form of collective neurosis. Lerner's arguments are often philosophically weak; claiming Jews have internalized such ``distortions'' as anti-Semitism, Lerner states that ``it is ludicrous to describe the abandonment of Judaism...as a product of rational choice.'' We are all victims of the past—so much for radical freedom. Contemporary Jews, according to Lerner, have lost touch with the revolutionary message of their religion, instead accommodating to secular, capitalist society. He paints a portrait of the American Jewish community as venal and corrupt. He offers no evidence, but he does have a villain: his favorite bogeyperson, Norman Podhoretz, and other neo-cons. Readers may want to go directly to Part III, a useful discussion of the ways in which Jewish renewal ideas are being expressed in ritual, from nonpatriarchal liturgy to a reappropriation of the Sabbath as an expression of human equality and dignity. Lots of mind-numbing analysis and little inspiration for Jews seeking a religious expression for their political convictions.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13980-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Fifth, final, and least satisfying volume of Merton's prodigious correspondence (The Courage for Truth, 1993, etc.). Previous books in this series have presented Merton's letters on writing, spirituality, friendship, and love. This time the prime focus is war, a subject about which Merton, a cloistered Cistercian monk, has little original to say. Mostly composed in the years just before and after the Cuban missile crisis, and usually directed toward peace activists like James Forrest or Gordon Zahn, these letters offer predictable mutterings about the dangers of nuclear holocaust, tendentious attacks on American right-wingers, and cracker-barrel advice on the idiocy of fallout shelters (``Lots of shelters that have been built have caved in or filled with water, etc.''). Occasional forays into religious themes reveal him to be a poor prognosticator as well, as when he misreads Vatican II as a ``tightening of the screws.'' More intriguing are letters concerning a meeting in 1956 between Merton and psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg, who, in the words of editor Shannon, labeled Merton ``neurotic in his need to get his own way and pathological in his demand for solitude.'' This harsh evaluation, which Merton seems to accept (``Zilboorg has been terrific''), is bolstered by letters surrounding Merton's vocational crisis of 1959, in which he applies for permission to leave his monastery for a hermitage. When the request is denied by his superiors, Merton at first accepts the decision but soon begins to agitate; tensions run high until he is allowed to enter a hermitage in the 1960s. In this episode and others, Merton comes off as Peck's Bad Boy, endlessly provoking Vatican officials and siding with mischief-makers. Some compensation for all this ego-preening comes near the end, in correspondence with unidentified monks and nuns to whom Merton offers simple, solid spiritual advice (``be patient, pay attention to obedience and to grace, trust God...''). Merton as bore. Try The Seven Storey Mountain instead.
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-29191-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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