PROTECTING THE RIPPER

Jonathan Hainsworth and Christine Ward-Agius. The Escape of Jack the Ripper. Amberley Books, 2020.

Although basically the Jack the Ripper story is just another unsolved criminal case, it has always had an odd sort of link to the world of Forteana. I think think the main reason for this is because of the culture of the era in which the Ripper’s murders took place.

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INTO THE TWILIGHT ZONES

Mike Jay. Stranger Than Fiction; Essays by Mike Jay. Daily Grail Publishing, 2018.

Mike Jay will be familiar to Magonia readers as the author of books and magazine articles on the ‘twilight zones’ of the human mind, with titles which have covered the history of drugs and other mind-altering processes.

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DON'T CALL US

Catherine Clément, The Call of the Trance, Seagull Books, 2014.

If one wants a highly idiosyncratic book in which personal speculation instantly becomes sweeping statement that instantly becomes fact, this is for you. It is also for those who might consider Sigmund Freud the absolute last word in wisdom and acuity. 

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CLASS REACTION

Robert E. Bartholomew with Bob Rickard. Mass Hysteria in Schools: A Worldwide History Since 1566. McFarland, 2014.

It’s not impossible that an episode of mass-hysteria might have sparked a major Middle-Eastern conflict. Fortunately that didn’t happen, but for a while it was a definite threat. In 1983 schoolgirls at a Palestinian school in the Israeli West Bank began to complain of headaches and blurred vision. They said their symptoms began when they started to smell a sulphurous odour which leaked into their classrooms. The school was evacuated.
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MADDER THAN MAD

Will Storr. The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science. Picador, 2013.

The first thing that strikes me about this book is that Will Storr and Picador must have some pretty expensive lawyers; the second is that I would have loved to have seen the unexpurgated version. The reason for this is that Storr takes on a whole range of scientific and other heretics, and some of their critics.
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VISIONS AND DISBELIEF

Oliver Sacks. Hallucinations. Picador, London, 2012

A number of varieties of hallucinatory experience are described, but this is by no means an exhaustive study, as such experiences are more common than is generally realised. Dr Sacks has made extensive use of the experiences of his patients, and of his own experiences. It was not until he was thirty that Dr Sacks started to experiment with drugs.
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INFLUENCING MACHINES

Mike Jay. The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and his Visionary Madness. Bantam, 2004.

James Tilley Matthews may have the unhappy distinction of being the first “modern madman”, that is the first person to present clear symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia as it is understood today. The story Jay tells is a fascinating one, Matthews had become involved with a radical politician, David Williams, and his scheme to prevent war between Britain and revolutionary France.
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HYSTERIA AND HYSTERICS

Andrew Scull. Hysteria: The Disturbing History. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Jan Goldstein. Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux Princeton University Press, 2011

In April 1602 a teenage London girl, Mary Glover, had a run in with a neighbour, Elizabeth Jackson, after which Mary, developed strange symptoms such as fits, a constriction in the throat, which made eating difficult, paralysis, swelling belly and etc. This led to the conviction of Elizabeth Jackson for witchcraft, for which she had to suffer a year’s imprisonment and several visits to the pillory.

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THE PSYCHOPATH TEST

Jon Ronson. The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. Picador, 2011.

Journalist Jon Ronson was asked by a neurologist to investigate a truly weird book she had received. While he was able to solve that problem fairly quickly, the search led him into the world of psychiatry, and the anti-psychiatry movement now largely dominated by Scientologists.
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THE FORGOTTEN EPIDEMIC

Molly Caldwell Crosby. Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of History's Greatest Mysteries. Berkeley Books, 2011.

If you were to ask citizens of the United States what was the very worst thing that had happened in their country since the Civil War, I would suspect that at least 90% would say 9/11. Sadly they wouldn't even be close; like the rest of the world their country was torn by two terrible epidemics which swept the world in the wake of the Great War.
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WHAT COLOUR IS YOUR PARAGRAPH?

V. S. Ramachandran. The Tell-Tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature. William Heinemann, 2011. 

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Maureen Seaberg. Tasting the Universe; People Who See Colors in Words and Rainbows in Symphonies. New Page, 2011. 

Ramachandran, who is Director of the Center for the Brain at the University of California, San Diego, continues his study of extraordinary cases in neurology which he began in Phantoms in the Brain. In this book he examines additional detail topics such as synesthesia, phantom limbs and the strange effects of various brain injuries caused by both strokes and injuries, as well as studies on autism.
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KNOWING ME, KNOWING WHO?

Elias Aboujaoude. Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality. W. W. Norton, 2011.

An American psychiatrist rehearses the many dangers of the Internet, from compulsive buying, gambling, watching porn, loosing your privacy, and drifting away from the real world into a much more exciting cyber one. It is probably the section on the false and often inflated personalities that people adopt online that comes closest to the sort of topics covered by Magonia.
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TRACKING THE BOY JONES

Jan Bondeson. Queen Victoria's Stalker: The Strange Story of the Boy Jones. Amberley, 2010.

'The Boy Jones' - Edward Jones - gained notoriety in the 1840s by making a series of intrusions into Buckingham Palace. At the time this was not as difficult as you might think, the Palace being run on a ramshackle system stretching back hundreds of years which seemed to have ensured that no-one was particularly responsible for anything. 
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