Skeptical Odysseys: Personal Accounts by the World's Leading Paranormal Investigations Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a collection of essays from skeptics, edited by Paul Kurtz and issued on the 25th anniversary of CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal). I especially recommend it to paranormal researchers and those who consider themselves to be believers, to really think about what it is they believe and consider evidence of the veracity of that belief. The essays are as follows:
Introduction: The Founding of the Skeptical Movement (Paul Kurtz)
=I. Twenty-Five Years of CSICOP
1. From the Editor's Seat: Thoughts on Science and Skepticism at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century (Kendrick Frazier)
2. Science vs. Pseudoscience, Nonscience, and Nonsense (James Alcock)
3. Never a Dull Moment (Barry Karr)
4. The Origins and Evolution of CSICOP: Science is Too Important to Be Left to Scientists (Lee Nisbet)
5. My Personal Involvement: A Quarter Century of Skeptical Inquiry (Paul Kurtz)
=II. Parapsychology
6. Why I Have Given Up (Susan Blackmore)
7. The Magician and the Think Tank (Leon Jaroff)
8. From Fate to Skeptical Inquirer (Barry L. Beyerstein)
=III. UFOs
9. UFOs: An Innocent Myth Turned Evil (Philip J. Klass)
10. The Odyssey of a UFO Skeptic (Robert Sheaffer)
11. Roswell Alien Descendants Come of Age (Bill Nye)
12. Metamorphosis: A Life's Journey from "Believer" to "Skeptic" (Gary P. Posner)
=IV. Astronomy and the Space Age
13. Killer-Comets, Pseudocosmogony, and Little Green Men (David Morrison)
14. Certain Uncertainties (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
=V. Astrology
15. Does Astrology Work? Astrology and Skepticism 1975-2000 (Geoffrey Dean and Ivan W. Kelly)
16. The Battle Against Pseudoscience: The Case of Astrology (Jean-Claude Pecker)
=VI. Popular Investigations
17. Adventures of a Paranormal Investigator (Joe Nickell)
18. Diary of a Canadian Debunker (Henry Gordon)
=VII. Creationism
19. My Favorite Pseudoscience (Eugenie Scott)
=VIII. Alternative Medicine
20. "Alternative Medicine": How It Demonstrates Characteristics of Pseudoscience, Cult, and Confidence Game (Wallace Sampson)
=IX. Skepticism Around the World
21. A Dozen Years of Dutch Skepticism (Cornelis de Jager and Jan WIllem Nienhuys)
22. A New Hope: From a Good Idea to Real Change (Massimo Polidoro)
23. A Skeptic in a Strange Land (Mario Mendez-Acosta)
24. Skepticism in Russia: Past and Present (Valerii A. Kuvakin)
25. Liberation from the Dark Dungeons of Blind Belief (Sanal Edamaruku)
26. Scientists, Educators, and Journalists Against the Demon's Temptation (Luis Alfonso Gamez)
=X. Some Personal Reflections
27. Skepticism and Science (Vern L. Bullogh)
28. Let Us Reflect: How a Thoughtful, Inquiring Watchman Provided a Mark to Aim At (Michael Shermer)
29. The Importance of Skepticism (Steve Allen)
30. When Corporations Embraced "Transformational Technologies" (Bela Scheiber)
=XI. Religion
31. Confessions of a Skeptic (Martin Gardner)
32. The Breath of God: Identifying Spiritual Energy (Victor J. Stenger)
33. Skepticism About Religion (Antony Flew)
34. Beyond the Bible Code: Hidden Messages Everywhere! (David E. Thomas)
=XII. From Skepticism to Humanism
35. In Retrospect: From Skeptic to Humanist (Robert A. Baker)
This is a wonderful and broad collection of outstanding essays on skepticism and the paranormal. However, in another sense, the situation is sad, in that literature about the paranormal is often divided into two philosophical camps, the literature of the believers and the literature of the skeptics. Most books are either the believers' "WooWoo du Jour" (channeling, UFOs, ghosts, etc.) -- a vast region of thousands of fringe books, or the books are in a much smaller scientific materialist camp of under a hundred books. And sadly, neither camp SERIOUSLY considers the literature of their rivals. For example, athough right 90% of the time, skepticism often ends up throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as in native herbalism cures sometimes classified these days as "Alternative Medicine."
The fact is, whether one believes in such things or not, these things are embedded in human culture over thousands of years, and mythological thinking is part of how the human mind thinks...that is the key. One should not lump together the deceivers and outright hoaxes, with the self-deluded or cases of paradolia, as skeptic literature often does. People seek meaning and pattern in all times and all cultures. Until/unless scientific materialism can merge its accuracy and veracity with some kind of meaning/philosophy that can fulfill the human needs for myth and emotion as well as intellect, it will not succeed in replacing the myths of this age or any other. The great thing about the late Carl Sagan, is that he was one of the few scientific materialists/skeptics able to communicate in an emotionally resonant way the kind of mythic narrative that is needed, as in his immortal Cosmos: Carl Sagan (7 DVD Set) series.
Personally, I am a subscriber to the "Night Eyes-Day Eyes" philosophy, that reality is the same thing, there is both a sun in the sky and there are stars in the sky (and the sun is of course a star as well!) but which one you see depends on whether it is day or night. But they are both always there, whether we see them or not, because reality is always liable to reason. Belief and reason based on empiricism are not incompatible, but need to inform each other to achieve veracity.

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The Legends of Tono Review

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(More customer reviews)Much of what we know of Japanese folklore might have been lost forever if it were not for two authors, Lafcadio Hearn and Kunio Yanagita. Both were avid collectors of the mysterious tales of weird and imaginative creatures that were passed down as oral folklore but never written down. Both did their work at the start of the Meiji era, a time when, in the name of modernization, the government and scholars of Japan were actively attempting to wipe out the beliefs and superstitions of previous eras which were thought to be embarrassing to a country entering the modern age.
"The Legends of Tono" (Japanese title "Tono Monogatari") is the most famous of Yanagita's works, collecting the narratives of the small town of Tono in Iwate prefecture, as told to him by local resident and storyteller Kizen Sasaki. The stories collected in "The Legends of Tono" include some of Japan's most famous monsters like the kappa and the child-ghosts zashiki-warashi. Along with Hearn's Kwaidan: Stories And Studies Of Strange Things and Ueda Akinari's Tales of Moonlight and Rain, "The Legends of Tono" is one of the most classic and important books on Japanese folklore.
A surprisingly small book for one that carries so much weight, there are exactly one hundred and nineteen legends spread out over fifty-eight pages. Many of these legends are only a sentence in length, and often there are three to four different legends on a page. Some of them are a bit longer, maybe a paragraph or two, and typical of Japanese folklore they do not tell a complete story but rather just describe an odd circumstance or the history behind some strange stone or tree local to a certain village. Many explain customs of the time in Tono village, and the movements of household gods and festivals. Some are sexual cautionary tales, and other frights designed to keep people in their proper place for fear of punishment. Yanagita's style was to record the legends in a straight-forward manner without decoration and little elaboration.
However, packed inside Yanagita's short sentences is an ocean of depth, one that is almost impossible to know just through a quick reading. Indeed, in Japanese there are annotated versions of "The Legends of Tono" that go on for four hundred pages or more digging into each of Yanagita's terse sentences as if mining for gold. His simple and direct writing style would become a massive influence on author Mishima Yukio (The Sailor who fell from grace with the sea) who considered "The Legends of Tono" to be the finest-written work of Japanese literature.
There was more to "The Legends of Tono" than simple folklore gathering and writing however. This was a book with a political agenda. Yanagita was protesting against official histories at the time, which concentrated only on the rich and powerful and ignored the lives and hopes of the millions of poor peasants who, in the words of someone with similar inclinations, "did most of the living and dying" in Japan. Yanagita did not want to see the stories of these people lost to the tides of time, and so he gathered them up and wrote them down for future generations.
This "100th Anniversary Edition" celebrates the original 1910 publication of "The Legends of Tono." It reprints the 1975 translation prepared by Yanagita-scholar Ronald A. Morse. Morse includes a preface to the 100th Anniversary Edition, the original forward to the 1975 edition written by Richard M. Dorson who had actually worked and studied with Yanagita, and a new introduction discussing the relevance of Yanagita's work today. These three introductions add a bit of bulk to the publication, and some background on Yanagita and his relevance.
Morse also includes a "Guide to English-Language Writings on Kunio Yanagita and "The Legends of Tono"" in the back of the book for those interested in pursuing further study on the man and his works.


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In 1910, when Kunio Yanagita (1875-1962) wrote and published The Legends of Tono in Japanese, he had no idea that 100 years later, his book would become a Japanese literary and folklore classic. Yanagita is best remembered as the founder of Japanese folklore studies, and Ronald Morse transcends time to bring the reader a marvelous guide to Tono, Yanagita, and his enthralling tales. In this 100th Anniversary edition, Morse has completely revised his original translation, now out of print for over three decades. Retaining the original's great understanding of Japanese language, history, and lore, this new edition will make the classic collection available to new generations of readers.

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Phantom Army of the Civil War and Other Southern Ghost Stories Review

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(More customer reviews)If you want spine tingling ghost stories from the Civil War skip this book. The plodding writing style makes what should've been some of the spookiest tales you could read seem dull.

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This is a haunting collection of personal encounters with the spirit world as they appeared in FATE magazine. These are tales handed down over the years that have their basis in the horrors of the Civil War.

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