A veteran reporter on the New Age scene (Beyond the Quantum, 1986) ably explains the latest hip paradigm before soaring off into hyperdimensional inner space. Our world and its contents, suggests Talbot, are ``only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.'' Behind the breathy prose, he's talking about the universe as a hologram; this is, as a three-dimensional representation of a higher reality. Two men fathered this theory: Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist who claims that the brain functions holographically; and physicist David Bohm, who took the ball from Pribram and carried it right through the goal posts, describing the cosmos as a ``holomovement,'' the ``explicate'' projection of an ``implicate'' reality. This implies, says Talbot, that the ``objective universe...might not even exist.'' So far so good, if a bit gooey. But Talbot then goes on a pixilated hologram hunt, unearthing evidence for the new paradigm in telepathy, schizophrenia, synchronicity, the placebo effect, stigmata, acupuncture, psychokinesis, poltergeists, precognition, UFOs, psychic archaeology-and more. Without exception, the author takes a naive approach to these phenomena (for instance, near-death experiencers are ``actually making visits to an entirely different level of reality''), evincing a sort of naive New Age Boy Scout eagerness that reaches its zenith when he talks about his own psychic adventures, like watching a ``small brown object'' materialize in his office. Fifty sold pages-then like, far out, man.
Pub Date: April 24, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-016381-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
Possibly the most slanted, conservative take on American church history to appear in recent memory. Reeves (History/Univ. of Wisconsin, Parkside; A Question of Character: The Life of John F. Kennedy, 1991, etc.) here publicly airs his grievances with dying mainline Protestant churches. He provides mountains of details to demonstrate that they are dying— no news there—and then makes the bold and unsubstantiated leap to the claim that they are failing because they have been overrun by liberal bleeding hearts who are hell-bent on neglecting the gospel, undermining patriotism, and teaching their Sunday school pupils to use condoms. Reeves also assails such predictable targets as multiethnic theological education, the churches' ``aggressive lesbian contingent,'' and homosexual ordination. At bottom, he asserts that mainline churches are ``stuck in the sixties'' in their affinity for social justice and confusion about personal morality. His incessant liberal-bashing is irritating and banal, but that alone does not make it poor history. Reeves accomplishes that by ignoring the larger, more provocative questions that other scholars have posed concerning the mainline's decline. Ultimately, Reeves's singleminded preoccupation with the dangers of liberalism diverts attention from a persistent motif of American history, which is that only religions not associated with power and authority will inevitably flourish, as, for instance, antiestablishment fundamentalist sects are doing today. An even more damning problem is that Reeves utterly ignores the phenomenon of religious pluralism (``Is modern America secular or Christian?'' he asks, as if these were our only options). This is predictable, considering Reeves's insistence that America's founding ``fathers'' intended it to be a Christian nation. A far better choice is Randall Balmer's brilliant ethnography, Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism (1995), which sensitively and provocatively explores the real issues underlying contemporary American Protestantism. Mainline churches may be dying, but they deserve a more intelligent eulogy than Reeves can provide.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82811-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Rather tedious ramblings of a middle-aged, handicapped lesbian trying to decide whether her spiritual home is a Zen center in California or a meditation retreat in New York. Tollifson, whose lack of a right hand made her an outsider from birth, says that by the age of 33 she had ``tried alcohol and drugs of every kind, sex of all imaginable varieties, several forms of therapy, and revolution.'' A radical feminist committed to revolutionary violence when she first encountered Zen practice, she soon became a resident of the Berkeley Zen Center and even pictured herself becoming a priest there. Before this could happen, however, Toni Packer, a New York teacher of a form of meditation lacking the rituals and paraphernalia of Zen, captured her imagination. Enthralled with Packer, Tollifson left Berkeley and entered Packer's Springwater Center for Meditative Inquiry and Retreats. From 1988 to 1995, the eight-year period that is the focus of this memoir, Tollifson ricocheted between these two centers, continually searching not just for a spiritual home but for the perfect one. To a nonpractitioner of meditation, her concern over whether it is better to meditate on a cushion or in an armchair seems petty, her hero worship of her teachers seems juvenile, and her repeated changes of mind about the form of meditation that is right for her become wearisome. What Tollifson skims over and what might have made an interesting story is her transformation from a drug-dealing addict and alcoholic living in bars to an ultraleftist dedicated to fomenting revolution and then to a sober and celibate meditator. Tollifson's life has not been an ordinary one, and if she chose to, she could undoubtedly tell an extraordinary story. A mostly dull, often repetitious exercise in self-indulgence.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-88792-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bell Tower/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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