Category: Books
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Recently I've become somewhat addicted to mystery fiction from the early part of the 20th century. I started with locked-room mysteries, which were very popular at that time. The first locked-room mystery ever written is the famous Edgar Allen Poe short story "Murders in the Rue Morgue." One of the most famous of all locked-room…
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I just submitted this review to Amazon, and since it's relevant to our interests, I thought I'd also post it here. ____ Retired college professor Stafford Betty has written more than one book on visions of the afterlife. In these books, such as The Afterlife Unveiled, he has compiled excerpts from channeled literature — material…
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Multiple news outlets have confirmed that James ("The Amazing") Randi, famed magician, escape artist, and skeptic of the paranormal, has died at the age of 92. Gabe Yuen, one of our faithful commentariat, informed me of this last night. Naturally, given the subject matter of this blog, I was frequently in disagreement with Randi's opinions.…
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I'm sorry to say that our longtime commenter Bruce Siegel passed away this week. As I understand it, Bruce, who was in his seventies, had suffered from serious cardiovascular problems since at least 2016. Though I never met Bruce, I got to know him online through his many comments here and through occasional emails. After…
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Conan Doyle for the Defense, by Margalit Fox, tells the gripping story of Oscar Slater, a German-born Jew who was arrested in Glasgow for the brutal murder of an elderly, wealthy woman, Marion Gilchrist. Sentenced to death, Slater won a reprieve at almost the last minute when his sentence was changed to life imprisonment at…
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Despite the paucity of my posts lately, I haven't been entirely idle. I finally got around to writing my book on the afterlife, which I call The Far Horizon: Perspectives on Life Beyond Death. I was planning to self-publish this short (45,000-word) book and maybe sell a handful of copies. But when I announced it…
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Over the years, I’ve tried reading various examples of the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, but usually without much success. The problem is that these fifteen-hundred-year-old codices, which were found buried in a large clay jar, are in poor condition, with many illegible or missing words. A typical translation might go something like this:…
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Back in 2007, I wrote a post about the book The Open Door, by Theon Wright, which had been recommended by a reader. I described the book as the detailed record of experiments in automatic writing carried out by Wright's parents, Nella and George, and later by Theon's brother Stowell and by Theon himself. The…
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The fourth and last excerpt from a chapter of my book, currently in progress. —- A natural question at this point would be: How do we know that the experiences of Mrs. Crans and Dr. Wiltse are not hallucinations? In fact, if it’s true that consciousness processes our perceptions according to mental categories, how can…
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Part three of the excerpts from a chapter of my book (in progress). Originally I planned to break up the chapter into three parts, but the last part of the chapter proved rather long, so I'm going to extend this series of posts with a fourth excerpt. —- Here’s a case of a different kind,…