New Books and Media

From the back cover: The summer of 1960 saw the Spiritualist world rocked by scandal, arguably the greatest to hit the movement. This author calls the scandal "Rifflegate." The editor of the Psychic Observer, America's leading psychic newspaper, and a paranormal investigator filmed six blatantly fraudulent seancés in infrared. Dressed as spirits, conspirators moved in and out of the seancés, unaware that their fraud and identities were about to be exposed on the front page of the Psychic Observer.

From the publisher's website: Ghostly encounters, alien abduction, reincarnation, talking to the dead, UFO sightings, inexplicable coincidences, out-of-body and near-death experiences. Are these legitimate phenomena? If not, how should we go about understanding them? In this fascinating book, Chris French investigates paranormal claims to discover what lurks behind this “weird shit.” French provides authoritative, evidence-based explanations for a wide range of superficially mysterious phenomena, and then goes further to draw out lessons with wider applications to many other aspects of modern society where critical thinking is urgently needed.

Using academic, comprehensive, logical, and, at times, mathematical approaches, The Science of Weird Shit convincingly debunks ESP, communicating with the dead, and alien abduction claims, among other phenomena. All the while, however, French maintains that our belief in such phenomena is neither ridiculous nor trivial; if anything, such claims can tell us a great deal about the human mind if we pay them the attention they are due. Filled with light-bulb moments and a healthy dose of levity, The Science of Weird Shit is a clever, memorable, and gratifying read you won't soon forget.

Further information at the publisher's website: The MIT Press.

From the back cover: There are potentially hundreds of people who have experienced bizarre events of Telephone Calls from the Dead, and much like ghosts, and any other parapsychological phenomena, they appear to be highly common. Once all explanations have been considered, psychological and physical, are we genuinely faced with the reality of contact with the dead and evidence for survival? This question has been asked before, and was investigated back in 1979, in a book entitled Phone Calls from the Dead, written by D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless. For many years, this subject has remained dormant, until now.

From the publisher's website: William James (1842–1910) was a leading figure in Western psychology, philosophy, and psychical research. While there is an inextricable relationship between the various strands of James’s work, his psychical research has been unfairly neglected in favor of classics such as The Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience. Read in light of one another, however, James’s “mainstream” writings can be seen as efforts to make philosophical, metaphysical, and psychological sense of his psychical research.

Mind Dust and White Crows bridges the illusory divide, placing James’s widely accepted works on mystical experience, theories of the soul, immortality, and metaphysics alongside his key writings on mediumship, telepathy, possession and other areas of psychical research. The result is a more integrated picture of James’s spiritually-minded writings, transcending the disciplinary stigmas so often imposed on them. Interestingly, some of James’s ideas seem to align with current interpretations of the soul and extended consciousness as derived from quantum physics.

This volume includes many rare articles, including material that has not been previously published in book form. Andreas Sommer’s introduction – written especially for this volume – highlights the importance of James’s work to the history and development of psychical research.

Further information at the publisher's website: White Crow Books.

From the publisher's website: Healing is on many people’s minds today. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and a host of other disruptions and disasters, many of us feel that we need healing – in our personal lives, for the environment and for our planet. But healing is rarely defined and is not an accepted part of medicine in the West. This book examines the relationship between healing and medicine through the eyes of an academic physician who changed his interests from biomedical research to healing late in his career in medicine. It is based on his experiences and stories of his encounters with patients, practitioners and others for whom healing has had a particular significance, as well as his rigorous research into the subject. A central theme of the book is that modern medicine needs to be more pluralistic in its approach to health and accept that spirituality and healing techniques have roles to play alongside scientific medicine, which currently has its base in materialism alone.

Further information at the publisher's website: Routledge. 

From the publisher's website: Jeff Tarrant was fascinated by the paranormal as a child but then his training as a neuropsychologist turned him into a hardcore skeptic. If something could not be reliably and consistently demonstrated in the laboratory, then it wasn’t real. These rigid ideas were gradually worn away as he repeatedly witnessed and experienced things that simply should not be possible—telekenesis, clairvoyance, telepathy, mediumship, energy healing, and more….This book follows his journey of studying, interviewing, and testing a wide variety of mediums, psychics, and healers as he tries to determine what is going on in their brains when they engage in these supernormal abilities. Readers will get to know these gifted people, exploring what makes them tick and discovering firsthand evidence that this stuff is real.

From the publisher's website: In the wake of the First World War and the 1918–19 pandemic, the world was left grappling with a profound sense of loss. It was against this backdrop that a Winnipeg couple, physician T.G. Hamilton and nurse Lillian Hamilton, began their research, documenting and photographing séances they held in their home laboratory. Their extensive study of the survival of human consciousness after death resulted in a stunning collection of hundreds of photographs, including images of tables flying through the air, mediums in trances, and, most curious of all, ectoplasm—a strange, white substance through which ghosts could apparently manifest.

Further information at the publisher's website: University of Manitoba Press.

From the publisher's website: Our thoughts are known to us, and us alone. But for a brief period in the 1960s, Ted Serios (1918–2006) attempted to prove that his inner reality could be documented. Serios demonstrated an ostensibly psychic act termed “thoughtography,” involving the transfer of mental images onto undeveloped Polaroid film. In studies supervised by respected Denver-based psychiatrist Dr. Jule Eisenbud, Serios produced over 1,000 anomalous photographs, a feat that has never been fully dismissed or wholly verified. Existing as an uncomfortable knot in time, the details of the Serios phenomenon can’t be disentangled without questioning the social conditions that produced it in the first place.

Further information at the publisher's website: Atelier Éditions

From the publisher's website: One of the last criminal trials using the 1735 Witchcraft Act was, improbably, in London in 1944. The accused was Helen Duncan, a middle-aged Scotswoman. This is her extraordinary story. Helen Duncan - known since childhood as 'Hellish Nell', for her uncontainable nature - was one of the most popular mediums of the twentieth century, holding seances around the country where she was believed to manifest the spirits of the dead.

Further information at the publisher's website: Penguin

From the publisher's website: The early nineteenth century witnessed the birth of psychiatry, a new medical science that fundamentally changed how mental illness was labelled and understood. Troubled by Faith explores how psychiatrists not only thought they were agents of modernity but that they could also explain the occult mysteries of the past. They bristled with confidence that, in an era of unprecedented change, unlocking the secrets of the mind was essential to an ordered and progressive society. And a progressive society was one that did not believe in witches, ghosts, and fairies, and did not exhibit excited religious emotions and divine communications. Through examining the extensive psychiatric literature from Europe and America, Troubled by Faith charts how once widely-held popular beliefs were pathologized, and how this fundamentally impacted on the notion of criminal and legal responsibility. In the second half of the book, we listen to the voices of asylum patients as recorded in case books. The asylum was an extraordinary cultural space where under one roof prophets, messiahs, the bewitched, and the haunted mixed, and people wrestled with angels, devils, imps, and witches. It was a place filled with talk of infernal machines and sinister electrical forces. Whether seriously ill and deluded, or sane and lucid in their beliefs and imaginings, patients’ experiences were, nevertheless, reflective of a society being transformed by technology and yet still rooted in the supernatural.

Further information at the publisher's website: Oxford University Press.

From the publisher's website: Into the Uncanny is the story of ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary things and want to make sense of them. Each one is a brand-new case never shared before; modern day, real-life ghost stories that will make your blood run cold. It is also a journey of self-discovery, as Danny explores what the paranormal means to us and the exciting and terrifying prospect that we are not alone. From poltergeists and apparitions, to UFOs and messages from beyond the grave, Into The Uncanny is a thrilling, adrenaline-filled supernatural adventure. Whether you're Team Believer or Team Sceptic, all you need is an open mind and a bit of courage. So, are you ready to investigate?

Further information at the publisher's website: BBC Books.

Review by Fred Andersson. 

From the publisher's website: Terminal lucidity is a relatively common but poorly understood phenomenon. Near the end of life, many people--including those who have suffered brain injuries or strokes, or have been silenced by mental illness or deep dementia--experience what seems a miraculous return. They regain their clarity and energy, are able to talk with families and caregivers, recall their lives and often appear to be aware of their nearing death.

In this remarkable book, cognitive scientist and Director of the Viktor Frankl Institute Dr. Alexander Batthyány offers the first major account of terminal lucidity, utilizing hundreds of case studies and his research in the related field of near-death studies to explore the mind, the body, the nature of consciousness, and what the living can learn from those who are crossing the border from life to death.

Further information at the publisher's website: St. Martin's Essentials