As a career civil servant with Britain’s Ministry of Defence, Pope served a three-year stint in the early 1990s as chief investigator of UFO sightings in the United Kingdom. He began as a skeptic and ended up a true believer. This book, a bestseller in Britain, attempts to explain his conversion but does a poor job of it. Fully a third of the book is spent discussing what is by now a familiar litany of UFO-related phenomena: Roswell, Area 51, the US Air Force “Blue Book” of UFO investigations, etc. Pope’s own work consisted mainly of investigating alleged sightings of UFOs, crop circles (huge, symmetrical designs mysteriously created in open fields), and cattle slaughters (aliens apparently like hamburgers). Slim as this investigative work is, and even though, as he himself admits, there is no proof of the existence of UFOs, Pope still insists that “there is a war going on” with aliens. To make matters worse, he contends, we aren’t even aware that this war is happening. He also assures us that 95 percent of UFO sightings go unreported, though his only evidence for this is that private UFO groups have said so. Still, the book is blessedly free of the paranoia found in so much of the UFO writing done in the US. For Pope, the government of Britain is not engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the existence of UFOs (as some believe about the US government); it just hasn’t bothered to do much investigating. He can also be lyrical, such as when describing the joy and wonder of visitors within a crop circle. But he can also turn around and be facile and trite. On the connection between aliens and ghosts he concludes, “The spirit world is highly complicated.” One would suppose this to be true. An odd, unconvincing statement of belief from a government official. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Jan. 27, 1999
ISBN: 0-87951-916-9
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
There are many lessons to be learned in these pages–not least of them, to keep your eyes open for oncoming teenagers.
"I'm a number on their ledger," writes O'Malley, in this thoughtful memoir of consumer David versus insurer Goliath. "And they're dedicated to a new medical oath: This above all, do no harm to our financials."
O'Malley suffered major spinal trauma when a sleeping 17-year-old driver rammed her car one August afternoon. Unable to work, and at both physical and emotional distance from her young adult son, she finds herself in the early pages of her memoir to be a kind of surrogate aunt to a young immigrant girl and a surrogate child to an aunt of her own; her portraits of these characters, and indeed of most of the figures in the narrative, are marked by affection, warmth and knowing humor. But the tale takes on a dark cast as O'Malley soon stands accused of being a malingerer and denied long-term disability pay while enduring more and more physical distress in the wake of her accident. In quest of relief, she tries the expected route–namely, scheduling appointments at her HMO and undergoing tests to discover why her pain should persist months after the accident. What follows is a Kafkaesque sequence of misunderstandings and evasions, as, by her account, one specialist after another administers the wrong test, takes the wrong X-ray and eventually cuts into the wrong section of her spine. In the subsequent chapters, she becomes something of an authority on her pain, providing at least some rebuttal to arrogant doctors who, one by one, ask what fine medical school she attended to allow her any opinion in the matter of her own health. O'Malley's unhappy tale ends well enough, thanks to the help of a doctor on the opposite end of the country from the angry neurologist who becomes her bête noire. Readers may be a tad frustrated, though, to discover that the real ending is a settlement whose terms she cannot discuss, inasmuch as she has discussed everything else so candidly.
There are many lessons to be learned in these pages–not least of them, to keep your eyes open for oncoming teenagers.Pub Date: June 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-4134-5487-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A collection that will surely interest readers already devoted to Virginia City lore, but that may not grab a general...
An amalgamation of ghost stories set in the remote town where Mark Twain honed his skills 140 years ago.
During a trip to Virginia City in 1999, Bruns and a friend approached a building with the intent of exploring it. As they entered, however, she stopped abruptly–this place seems haunted, she said. Bruns had always found supernatural phenomena such as ghosts fascinating, but had never known quite what to make of claims that otherworldly beings exist. This experience, though, intrigued and annoyed him simultaneously. How could she sense ghosts when he couldn't? He decided to investigate further by interviewing certain people in Virginia City. Tales were "hurled" at Bruns, "unsolicited at the very mention" that he was collecting ghost stories. As a result, many of the stories name actual people and, "at least in their minds, actual events." Inundated with varying versions and copious detail, Bruns decided he would "combine different stories from different people into a single narrative, just to capture all the many ways in which spirits choose to manifest themselves." This was a dubious decision, as many of the stories are simply not compelling as fiction and track poorly as nonfiction. The word "true" muddies the interpretation of the stories, as does his caveat that "Like Mark Twain, I see no reason why I should let the truth get in the way of a good story." After chronicling the hauntings of specific sites–the Silver Terrace Cemetery, the Old Funeral Parlor, a D Street Residence, the Gold Hill Hotel and the Pioneer Emporium, to name a few–Bruns provides briefly researched histories that work nicely. Four maps at the back of the book aid understanding of northern Nevada, Virginia City itself and two of the haunted locales.
A collection that will surely interest readers already devoted to Virginia City lore, but that may not grab a general audience.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9745217-1-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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