A reasonable, readable excursion into realms of unreason—and good evidence to pay attention to dreams and hunches.
Fascinating exploration of the eldritch matter of foreknowledge.
In 1902, a British soldier in the Boer War dreamed of a volcano exploding on an unnamed island, recognizably a French colony, and killing 4,000 people. A few weeks later, he read a newspaper account of the explosion of Mont Pelée on Martinique, which killed 40,000. “I was out by a nought,” he remarked of the discrepancy in the death count. More precise, writes London-based New Yorker staff writer Knight, was the foretelling on the part of a middle-aged Briton who warned of an impending air crash that would kill 124 people—the exact casualty count when a French passenger jet crashed a few days later. (The toll would rise when two wounded survivors succumbed later.) “Premonitions are impossible,” writes the author, “and they come true all the time.” Though Arthur Koestler attempted to wrestle the matter to the ground in his 1972 book The Roots of Coincidence, there wasn’t much effort to quantify it until a British science editor named Peter Fairley established a “premonitions bureau” at the London Evening Standard in the mid-1960s, inviting readers to submit predictions that the paper would then track. The correlations weren’t definitive, most “impossible to verify,” but there were enough to lend credence to the idea that there are people who seem to have special connections to future events. Though, as Knight observes, the laws of thermodynamics don’t support it, things can “prefigure in our minds.” Few of those things are happy. For instance, the author profiles an eccentric British psychiatrist who came into contact with Fairley after investigating a terrible Welsh disaster in which 116 children died, one of them a little girl who had told her mother of a dream in which her school was covered with “something black”—the flood of coal slurry that overcame the victims.
A reasonable, readable excursion into realms of unreason—and good evidence to pay attention to dreams and hunches.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-984879-59-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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