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
The most thorough and authoritative of the flood of new books occasioned by the full release of the Dead Sea Scrolls between 1991 and 1993. Schiffman (Near Eastern Studies/New York Univ.), a Hebrew and Judaic studies expert who now serves on the editorial team that is publishing the scrolls, clearly presents what scholars know and, equally important, what they don't know about the documents that many would agree constitute the greatest archaeological find of the century. He describes in considerable detail the contents and the political and religious historical context of the scrolls, produced between 150 bce and 70 ce during the Greek and Roman conquests of Palestine. But Schiffman also makes the case for a paradigm shift in the manner in which the scrolls should be viewed and interpreted. As he notes: ``The first generation of scroll scholars, primarily Christians interested in either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, did not understand the scrolls for what they were: documents illuminating the history of Second Temple Judaism...What resulted therefore, was a Christianized version of the scrolls.'' Schiffman, in contrast, views the scrolls as Jewish texts. He rejects earlier theories, such as that the scrolls were written by the ascetic sect of Essenes, and makes the case for many of the scrolls being of Sadducee origin (the Sadducees were an anti-Rabbinic group that had links to the priestly class). An updated tale of the discovery, acquisition, and deciphering of the Dead Sea Scrolls would make a great narrative. But this is not Schiffman's aim. For now, Edmund Wilson's 1954 The Dead Sea Scrolls, based on his New Yorker reportage, remains the classic page-turner about the scrolls. Schiffman's scholarly presentation is plodding, but his arguments and conclusions are well reasoned and reliable. (For more on the Dead Sea Scrolls, see Neil Asher Silberman, The Hidden Scrolls, p. TK.) Scholars in religious studies, seasoned scroll amateurs, and newcomers to this fascinating subject can all benefit from immersion in this welcome volume. (40 photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8276-0530-7
Page Count: 520
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
International intrigue, scholarly arrogance, and eccentric personalities populate this examination of what the Dead Sea Scrolls really tell us. Since their discovery by Bedouins in the 1940s, the scrolls have been variously used as a springboard for academic careers, patriotic propaganda for the modern state of Israel, and material for the spinning of ancient conspiracy theories. Silberman (A Prophet from Amongst You, 1993, etc.) presents both a stunning indictment of the small cadre of scholars who controlled access to the scrolls for decades and a marvelous revisionist reconstruction of the ancient community that produced the scrolls. He argues convincingly that the cloistered, middle-class scholars who transcribed the scrolls and exclusively published their contents at a glacial pace until a series of highly publicized recent actions were blind to what the scrolls revealed. Rather than the quietist religious community living in the desert before the first century ce that has been standard fare since the earliest publications of the scrolls, Silberman provides a commanding defense of the oft-maligned theory that the Qumran community lived and wrote as an underground anti-imperial revolutionary group during the same period that produced Christianity. Silberman's careful laying out of evidence should create a reasonable doubt in most readers' minds that the circumstances described in the scrolls make much more sense in a first century ce context than in the earlier period previously accepted. And his presentation of early Christians as a group from the same milieu, but who abandoned militancy and nationalism in favor of a message of love that was tolerable to the Roman colonizers, equally undermines what he sees as an unwarranted implication of the superiority of Christianity over Judaism in scrolls research. (For more on the Dead Sea Scrolls, see Lawrence H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, p. TK.) Silberman takes sides, but he comes across as fair and judicious. His depiction of the interplay between ancient history and its manipulation by nations, quacks, and petty academics is terrific.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13982-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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