SENSE ON PSI

Caroline Watt. Parapsychology: A Beginner’s Guide. OneWorld, 2016

In a field increasingly dominated by rival certainties, many seemingly fuelled by America’s culture wars, it was a pleasant surprise to read this admirably even-handed introduction to parapsychology. 
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SKINNY RIMMER, SPRING HEEL JACK AND THE BYE BYE MAN

Robert Damon Schneck. The Bye Bye Man and Other Strange-But-True Stories. Tarcher Perigree 2016. (2nd revised edition)

Robert Schneck is the author of Mrs Wakeman and the Antichrist, a collection of weird and wonderful incidents from American history, including the invention and successful testing of a remarkably effective auto-decapitation device. The present book was originally published as The President’s Vampire and in this new edition contains further research on the eponymous monster.
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WESTWARD HO HO HO!

Suze Gardner. The A-Z of Curious Devon. History Press, 2016.

A varied collection of strange and curious stories, hauntings, legends, lore and historical oddities from the South-West, arranged as an alphabetical gazetteer, by town and village. 

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1177 AND ALL THAT

Eric H. Cline. 1177 B.C. The Year Civilisation Collapsed. Princeton University Press, 2015 (Paperback).

History is not what it used to be. It was my least favourite subject at school. Why did I have to remember facts and dates that were utterly boring and totally irrelevant to my life? Now, in senior years and with a bit of history of my own, it is one of my favourite subjects. I find the subject not only enjoyable but also educational and highly relevant to an understanding of the complex world we live in.
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CHURCH, STATE, AND WITCHCRAFT

Alexandra Tātāran. Contemporary Life and Witchcraft: Magic, Divination and Religious Ritual in Europe. ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart. 2016.

Discussion of ‘contemporary witchcraft’ usual means Wicca or similar practices in Britain, Europe and North America, or older beliefs in South American, sub-Saharan Africa and traditional tribal societies. 

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AMAZONS: ARMED, DANGEROUS ... AND REAL

Adrienne Mayor, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, Princeton University Press, 2015.

Until very recently in the West, the adjective ‘Amazon’ was something of an insult. If any admiration was involved in its use, it was grudging and more often than not, unconscious in a Freudian kind of way. To a typical educated Victorian, for example, to call a woman an ‘Amazon’ was to imply a rather butch, strapping harpy – possibly a whiz at sports and horse-riding and threateningly autonomous. She would also be possessed of none of the vacuous tittering modesty so prized in women of their own era.

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HIDDEN AMONG US

S. D. Tucker. The Hidden Folk: Are Poltergeists and Fairies Just the Same Thing? Fortean Words, 2016.

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Albert S. Rosales. Humanoid Encounters: The Others Among Us,  2010-2015. Triangulum Publishing, 2016.

If you asked most people they would argue that belief in fairies is a dead superstition and that the stories told of them were purely cultural inventions and not memories of actual experiences. These two books challenge that view, one explicitly, the other implicitly. Magonia readers will be familiar with the connections between fairy lore and UFO stories, an issue raised back in the very early years of MUFOB, and one popularised by Jacques Vallee in Passport to Magonia.
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BURNING BRIGHT

Joscelyn Godwin. Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early New York State. Excelsior Editions, University of New York Press. 2015.

In the early 19th century, western and central New York State became known as the burned-over district. The evangelist Charles Finney coined the phrase, saying that so many fires of religious revivalism had swept across the district in such a short time, there was no fuel (unconverted people) left to burn (convert). 

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JUST CLOWNING AROUND

Benjamin Radford. Bad Clowns. University of New Mexico Press, 2016.

According to the back-cover blurb of Benjamin Radford’s Bad Clowns it will “blend humour, investigation and scholarship to reveal what is behind the clown’s dark smile.” Certainly the first four chapters (roughly forty pages) supplied me with a fair degree of engaging scholarship.
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