BLACK ARTS, GREY AREA

John William Wickwar. Witchcraft and the Black Art. Fonthill Media. New edition 2012. (Originally published 1925)

Witchcraft, or not so much witchcraft as the belief in it, is a very mysterious thing. Why is it that, throughout the ages, in many different cultures that could have had no contact with each other, there was, and is, a belief that certain people, usually women, have great paranormal powers, and that they use those powers for evil?
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TAKING THE CONTROLS ON SPACESHIP EARTH

George M. Young. The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers. Oxford University Press, 2012.

For decades now we have been told that human beings are 'naked apes', that we are a small part of the natural world, an evolutionary dead-end, latecomers whose actions are threatening the balance of nature, and that our aim should be to minimise man's impact on the environment.
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WE ARE THE MARTIANS?

Giovanni F. Bignami, We are the Martians: Connecting Cosmology with Biology, Springer-Verlag Italia, 2012.

This is a short book of student notes giving an interdisciplinary treatment of recent findings on the development of the universe (or at least the observable part of it) from the Big Bang to the emergence and evolution of living organisms. The account of the development of the universe leading to the formation of galaxies containing billions of stars and planets is as described in many popular books on astronomy and cosmology.
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FIRST READ: TWO CLASSIC GHOST BOOKS

Joseph Braddock. Haunted Houses, illustrated by Felix Kelly. Batsford, 1956.

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Alasdair Alpin MacGregor. Phantom Footsteps: A Second Ghost Book. Robert Hale, 1959.

The word “read” in the heading needs to be interpreted fairly broadly in this case. I was first intrigued by the cover of Phantom Footsteps, when seen in, I think, the book department of Lewis’s department store in Manchester back in the Christmas of 1961.
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BURIED IN CONFUSION

Neal Sutton. Buried by the Church. Matador, 2012. 

"The Da Vinci Code lit the fuse… Now… The Explosion”. So goes the publisher’s promotion at the top of the cover of this book. We are led to believe that Mr Sutton is going to stun everyone who ever opened a Bible. Indeed and, (spoiler alert) with Dan Brown’s staggering bombshell that Jesus had offspring that survived into the present day, one may expect that if this tome is to top that kind of Christian spanner in the works then it really does need to pull something very spectacular indeed from out of the scriptural hat.

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ON THE EDGE

Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan (editors). Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness: Liminal Zones, Psychic Science and the Hidden Dimensions of Mind. Evolver Editions, 2012.

Despite an interesting title much of the material in this book could be characterised as 'New Age', and though several of the essays might, if decoded, contain some interesting ideas, I have neither the time nor inclination to plough through the New Age consciousness expanding and general high flown rhetoric to discover them.
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150 UP

I notice that today we've just registered the 150th country on our flag counter. Congratulations to the lovely island of Martinique on joining the ever-expanding Magonian empire. (Great flag, guys!)