Very funny, and packed with oddities. If Ronson doesn’t manage to expose this official hall of mirrors entirely, he still...
British journalist (Them, 2001) and documentary filmmaker Ronson digs into the various psychic operations of the U.S. armed forces, from their origins in Vietnam to their uses today.
In 1979, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon created the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual, expressing the visionary position that soldiers of the future would, among other things, “fall in love with everyone, . . . bend metal with their minds, walk on fire, [and] calculate faster than a computer.” The Army, eager for a new kind of fighter, bought into it, and Ronson now traces the circuitous routes of men who have since attempted to bring the super-soldier into being. The writer’s sources are a mix of ranking military men and fringe characters attracted by the idea of psychic doings. Former U.S. Army Chief of Intelligence, Major General Albert Stubblebine III, who held his post in the early ’80s, recalls his frustrated efforts to get the Special Forces to adopt Channon’s strategies; Special Forces reps failed to disclose that they already had their own psychic division up and running. Stubblebine’s protégé in things psychic, Major Ed Dames, has long been a public face of PSYOPS (psychic operations), principally through his appearances on the same syndicated radio program whose reporting on the Hale-Bopp comet prompted the Heaven’s Gate cult members to kill themselves in the hopes of catching a ride. In his quest into the realms of the weird, Ronson has turned up any number of eerily credible tales: just for starters, there’s murder by the CIA; current torture schemes in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay (some involve playing Fleetwood Mac in prisoners’ cells), and a man who claims to be able to stop a hamster’s heart by staring at it.
Very funny, and packed with oddities. If Ronson doesn’t manage to expose this official hall of mirrors entirely, he still makes an admirable effort, entertaining and alarming in equal parts.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4192-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
The writing in this terrifying tale is neither sophisticated nor nuanced, but the facts—presented bravely and unstintingly—are powerful. This is the closest thing imaginable to a modern-day slave narrative: the story of a woman basically imprisoned by a brutal repeat attacker and by an impotent and incompetent police force. Divorced and living alone with her young daughter, Skalias was first raped in 1977 by Lanny Gene Bevers Jr., a man she had known glancingly through his brother, who had done some yard work for her husband. Despite the rapist's threats that if she went to the police he would kill her and her daughter, Skalias identified him. She methodically recounts the steps leading up to the trial, including Bevers's extradition from Germany, where he was serving in the military, and her own lie detector test, taken in order to ``prove'' that she was raped; one officer offhandedly comments that this is the first rape he's ever heard of that didn't involve ejaculation. Finally, Bevers's fingerprints on the window he had broken to enter her house led to a 20-year prison sentence. Assured that the parole board would alert her before releasing Bevers, Skalias was shocked to awaken one night seven years later and find him standing in her bedroom with a stocking over his head. The second rape was even more brutal; Bevers severed her thumb and beat her beyond recognition. Despite her insistence that she recognized Bevers and his methods, the police almost forced her to implicate another suspect when she was heavily sedated. Meanwhile, Bevers began to make increasingly threatening phone calls to Skalias. The reproduction of transcripts of those calls is one example of the straight-on tactics used here in a constant emotional assault by Skalias and Davis, former Tarrant County district attorney's victim assistance coordinator. Skalias has since been relocated and given a new identity; her story is being made into an ABC TV movie. Frightening and enlightening. (16 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1994
ISBN: 1-56530-146-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Lyrical tale of the survival and triumph of a small farm amid the suburban sprawl of southern California, with writing as rich and satisfying as the taste of a ripe melon. Fairview Gardens exists amid tract housing, malls, and endless miles of freeway. Ableman (founder of the Center for Urban Agriculture; From the Good Earth, not reviewed) tells of how the farm made peace with this suburban world and how this world came to first tolerate and then embrace this oasis of connection to the land. It hasn—t been easy. Homeowners do not rest quietly with manure spreaders hard at work near their backyards; Ableman resents, albeit with grace, the imprecations of the modern world onto the land he manages. Yet, over time, the farm has become accepted as an eccentric neighbor, at first as a convenient place to buy good, healthy food and then as a repository of the dying knowledge of what is to be learned from working the land. Ableman’s writing on these lessons—perseverance, patience, humility, a feeling of empowerment when one eats what one grows—forms the heart of this work. It is writing of inspiring joy, without the overblown “cosmic” rhetoric that often mars such paeans to nature. Along the way he offers some valuable tips to farmers, on mulching, watering, weeding, fighting city hall. Today Fairview Gardens is a public place, not a bucolic back-to-nature vacation spot for the few. It stands not apart from the community but within it, no small reason for its survival in the face of hungry developers. It remains a thriving farm, but also a place where people, especially children, come to experience the land. Among a sprawl of books incessantly issued and hyped, this small, wise volume quietly calls us to read and be renewed. (50 color photos)
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8118-1921-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
