SHORT REVIEWS: GHOSTS AND GODS

 David Brandon. Haunted Chester. The History Press, 2008. Some nice photographs, but otherwise a rather lazy and disappointing account of alleged hauntings in this historic city. There are only a couple or so of actual anomalous personal experiences which are recounted, and much of the text consists of weasel words of the "it is said that" variety, sprinkled with some touristy fakelore.

Jan W Vandersande. Life After Death: Some of the Best Evidence. Outskirts Press, 2008. Much of the 'best evidence' presented here consists of tales of physical mediumship, complete with ectoplasm and full form materialisations. As always there are assertions that the conditions preclude fakery, but the actual evidence produced, photographs are decidedly unimpressive, and those of the full form materialisations looking like nothing so much as some guy dressed in long drapery and wearing a false beard. If we could understand how this sort of 'evidence' convinces intelligent people like Vandersande (a physicist) we may well be very close to an understanding of the source of many stories of anomalous personal experiences.

Jeff Belanger, The Ghost Files: Paranormal Encounters, Discussion and Research from the Vaults of www.ghostvillage.com. New Page Books, 2007. A general popular account which, like nearly all the same sort of spiritualism-lite stuff, is more a compendium of contemporary folklore and superstition than a contribution to psychical research.

Victor J. Stenger, Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness. Prometheus Books, 2009. Having, at least to his own satisfaction, demolished the God/gods of traditional theologies, quantum physicist Victor Stenger here takes on some of the post modern, quantum cool variety, and attempts to build theologies around quantum mechanics, or at least the New-Agey, consciousness-centred interpretations of it. There are some interesting and provocative arguments in this book, but rather too much space is spent on rehearsing the history of physics and its main concepts. Stenger's own interpretations of QM and other aspects of physics are by no means easy to follow. It strikes me that these arguments about the 'correct' interpretations of QM tell us rather more about the backgrounds and beliefs of individual physicists than about nature itself.