UNSETTLING SCIENCE

S. D. Tucker. Space Oddities; Our Strange Attempts to Explain the Universe. Amberley, 2017.

In his previous book, Forgotten Science: Strange Ideas from the Scrapheap of History, the author took a look as some of the bizarre ideas that had been put forward to explain how the world works. He pointed out that many of those ideas, strange as they seem to us now, were not so ridiculous when examined in the light of scientific knowledge at the time when they were put forward, and mostly were only subsequently seen to be misplaced as our understanding evolved.
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IMAGINATION AND REALITY

Barton M Nunnelly. Mysterious Kentucky: Volume One, The History, Mystery and Unexplained of the Blue-Grass State. Triangulum, 2017.

Barton M Nunnelly. Mysterious Kentucky: Volume Two, The Dark And Bloody Ground. Triangulum, 2017.

Ron Quinn. Little People. Galde Press, 2010. (Second printing 2017)

Linda Zimmerman. More Hudson Valley UFOs: Including Western Connecticut, Northern New Jersey and Beyond. Eagle Press, 2017.

Folklore is often presented as a collection of timeless and presumably generations-old stories collected by clergymen’s daughters while visiting the ‘aged poor’, and being representative of quaint country ways. This often true of tales of the supernatural, which often start with the words “it is said that” or “local people say” and are little more than rumours of rumours.🔻

PICTURING PHILOSOPHY

Steven Nadler and Ben Nadler. Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy. Princeton University Press, 2017.

The seventeenth century was a difficult and dangerous time for philosophers. To challenge set ideas that the earth was the centre of the cosmos, that kings maintain their divine right to rule and religious orthodoxy be sacrosanct, created a heretical volcano for the establishment.
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AWAY WITH THE FAIRIES

Richard Firth Green. Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church. University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Nearly all human cultures have conceived of liminal beings that straggle the divide between mortal and immortal, matter and spirit, good and evil, habitat and wilderness. In western culture these beings have been given names such as fairies, elves, trolls, boggarts etc., in Islamic culture they are the djinns, and other cultures have their equivalents.
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NORTHERN ECHOES: 50 YEARS ON

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This summer marks the 50th anniversary of my major involvement in ufology, for it was then that I bought in one of the Manchester bookshops, now long gone, a copy of the magazine format Flying Saucer Menace written by Brad Steiger in the days before he found the New Age. It was 64 pages of sensationalist text, photos of UFO luminaries and lots of photos of UFOs, of varying degrees of dubiousness.
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SIGNPOSTS TO UTOPIA

Michael J. Lewis, City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning, Princeton University Press, 2016.

A history of town planning and architecture is unusual Magonian fare, but this one does have some relevant aspects, dealing as it does with religious sects as well as touching, albeit reluctantly, on aspects of esotericism.
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GOD'S BLACK EYE

John Dvorak. Mask of the Sun: The Science, History and Forgotten Lore of Eclipses. Pegasus Books, 2017.

On 21 August 2017 a total solar eclipse will track across the United States, passing over twelves states, including five state capitals. As the day approaches, and 'eclipse fever' builds up, millions of Americans and visitors from around the world will make plans to see the awesome spectacle, hoping that the skies will be clear.
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EXPLAINING THE EUREKA MOMENT

David N. Stamos, Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka, and Scientific Imagination, SUNY Press, 2017.

The latecomer to a Magonian meeting always runs the risk of finding that they’ve been ‘volunteered’ to review a book that, because the subject matter appears rather recherché, everyone else has passed on. Such is the case here. As someone who has read very little Edgar Allen Poe – a little that doesn’t include the book that’s the focus of this study - I approached this book with more than a few reservations.
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AND THE UFOLOGISTS GO ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND...

Robbie Graham (editor) UFOs: Reframing the Debate. White Crow Books, 2017.

I am starting this review on 24 June 2017; the 70th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of nine strange objects over the Cascade Mountains, which launched the social panic that began the age of the UFO. This book, a collection of fifteen essays, coincides with that anniversary and seeks to present new and differing perspectives on ufology.

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