Reviews | Now I See …

2012-0724

Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife

Comments Off[Author: mkeltz Category: Paranormal, Reviews ]

By Raymond Moody, MD, and Paul Perry

HarperCollins Publishers, HarperOne, 2012 Click to Buy this Book!

Paranormal is the autobiography of Raymond A. Moody, Jr., MD (b. June 30, 1944 in the small town of Porterdale, Georgia). It is the thirteenth book he has published, with five co-authored by Paul Perry, author of Transformed by the Light. Dr. Moody is a psychiatrist who is best known for his first book Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon – Survival of Bodily Death. First published in 1975 when Moody was 31-years old, this book definitely spoke to the new consciousness of the time, for interest in such subjects as the paranormal, the occult, “out-of-body” experiences, and karma and reincarnation had increased enormously in the early 1970s. Life After Life “… Climbed onto every bestseller list in the world, where it stayed for more than three years. Why this took place can be answered in one word: vacuum. Up to this point the subject had been considered one that belonged to the world of religion, and therefore it had received little if any examination by medical science. Hence, there was no real scientific examination of the possibility of life after life.” However, this statement does not take into account the major contributions that had been made at the beginning of the 20^th century through the lifework of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) and many others — including groups of physicians — within the streams of Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science. During the 1970s many of the books by Rudolf Steiner that had been translated into English appeared in public libraries and in book stores, including Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, copyright 1947, that contained, e.g., chapters on “The Continuity of Consciousness” and “Life and Death,” and Occult Science – An Outline, copyright 1969, with subsections from Chapter VII titled “Man’s Life After Death,” and “The Way to Supersensible Cognition.”

The above citations are not intended in any way to diminish the value of the independent, groundbreaking work of Dr. Moody, who originated the term near-death experience (NDE), but only to point out that there had not been a “vacuum” in these areas, but a lack of academic and public knowledge about the accessibility of the literature of Anthroposophy and Spiritual Science and the new evolutionary impulses in the advances of consciousness that these movements facilitated. Part of the great value of Life After Life, with its personal accounts of NDEs, is that it became a popular and well-known book; profound experiences of a shift in consciousness to a real spiritual existence following severe crises of suffering were conveyed to readers in friendly everyday language; the deepest questions about death began to be answered, and hope was offered for possible further contact and communication with loved ones who had died.

Paranormal offers something of the psychoanalytic self-evaluation that might be expected of a psychiatrist, but it is largely an informal life review for purposes of revealing Dr. Moody’s painful struggle with the disease of hypothyroidism, called myxedema, and how this affected his life, yet more importantly – as some readers will wonder from the beginning – how this may have affected his work. The Introduction describes Dr. Moody’s suicide attempt in 1991 with an overdose of Darvon, a result of the fact that his long-misdiagnosed illness had reached an unbearable stage. “From my late twenties until now I have lived with a disease called myxedema. This is a difficult affliction to diagnose. Simply stated, with this disease the thyroid gland does not produce enough thyroxine, a hormone that acts in our body something like the volume dial on a radio. The result of this disease is a variety of peculiar symptoms that can lead to myxedema madness, in which the afflicted person gradually loses his mind.” His life was saved through a phone call made to Paul Perry, who apparently kept Dr. Moody on the phone long enough for the police and then the Emergency Medical Technicians to reach him. The generally short Chapters that follow the Introduction detail his life: the death of his beloved grandfather, his early interest in astronomy, his discovery of Plato’s The Republic while a student at the University of Virginia, More »

Tags: Afterlife, book review, Life, Martha Keltz, paranormal, Paul Perry, Pursuit, Raymond Moody

2012-0704

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Comments Off[Author: mkeltz Category: Biography, Reviews ]

By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, New York, 2005 Click to Buy this Book!

In the Author’s Note and Acknowledgments section, Martin Sherwin informs the reader that this biography was 25 years in the making. The work began in 1979 with a visit to the “Oppenheimer Ranch” in New Mexico, called Perro Caliente (“hot dog”), a few months after Sherwin signed a contract with publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Here he met Peter Oppenheimer, Robert’s son. Kai Bird, author of The Color of Truth, was invited to join him as co-author in 2000. Both authors “acknowledge the percipiency” of two friends who suggested the title of the book, “American Prometheus.” It will be indicated at the conclusion of this review, however, that this is not an appropriate title: J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) hardly stands up at all by comparison with the Titan Prometheus.

The five-part biography is 721 pages in length, and the reader may soon begin to wonder why it was necessary to include so many personal or private details about the life of Oppenheimer and those he knew or influenced. To the degree that biographical research and writing make no attempt to approach the science of the spirit, as is called for in our time, it risks sinking, by way of compensation, into a haze of insignificant details that will eventually prove tiresome for the most determined of readers. In contrast to American Prometheus, author William Sheehan approaches and enters into the realm of the spirit, although tentatively, in his biography of Edward Emerson Barnard, The Immortal Fire Within.

The Preface of American Prometheus introduces the central theme of Oppenheimer’s personal trials that began in the year 1953 when his life “suddenly spun out of control” after he received a letter from the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) hinting at espionage activities and stating that Oppenheimer had been declared a security risk. The government, i.e., J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, had been hounding Oppenheimer for years with constant surveillance and illegal wire-taps because of his affiliations with the Communist Party in the 1930s. Through long detailed expositions, the authors stress that interest in communism was popular among many young academic intellectuals at that time. They were seeking, through involvement with various left-wing movements, the ideal of a humanitarian social order along the lines of socialism or communal sharing, and were apparently unaware of the dark and brutal side of Russian communism. The conclusions of the AEC’s hearings are revealed near the end of the book, in Chapter Thirty-Seven, titled “A Black Mark on the Escutcheon of Our Country.” “By a vote of two to one, the board deemed Oppenheimer a loyal citizen who was nevertheless a security risk.” Oppenheimer (often affectionately called Opje or Oppie) had his security clearance revoked, yet went on to live the rich and rewarding life of a respected professor of physics and an international celebrity. Ironically, in Latin America the admired physicist was called “El Padre de la Bomba Atomica.” (There is no evidence in this thoroughly researched book that Oppenheimer ever passed on secrets about the atomic bomb to Russia, as claimed in the 1994, 1995 book by Pavel A. Sudoplatov, who had been a KGB agent, a spy and an assassin. Who, besides conspiracy theorists, would believe the word of someone like Sudoplatov?) More »

Tags: American, biography, book review, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Kai Bird, Martha Keltz, Martin J. Sherwin, Prometheus, Tragedy, Triumph

2012-0619

The Immortal Fire Within: The Life and Work of Edward Emerson Barnard

2 Comments[Author: mkeltz Category: Biography, Reviews ]

By William Sheehan

Published by Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2007 Click to Buy this Book!

This 429-page biography of Edward Emerson Barnard (1857–1923), an astronomer who is best known for his discovery of Jupiter’s fifth satellite, now named Amalthea, and “Barnard’s Star,” was published in its paperback edition in 2007 and, with its new preface, the same wealth of photographs, and 27 chapters that present the biography in precise chronological order, it will prove a treasure for amateur astronomers and serious readers alike. However, even in the paperback version this is a very costly book, although it can continuously serve as a course in astronomy, particularly as the science developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Especially helpful is the fact that the footnotes are included at the end of each chapter, instead of at the end of the book. Reading slowly, a chapter at a time, will nearly guarantee thoughtful visualizations of starry night skies, and summon many familiar questions regarding the mysteries of the universe. It will also be discovered that author William Sheehan (an amateur astronomer and a psychiatrist by profession) touches upon the meaning of the words The Immortal Fire Within only very lightly and in few places, yet somehow the deeply significant meaning of these words pervades the entire book, as though throughout the long process of studying and writing this biography Sheehan had put this question to E.E. Barnard himself and awaited the answer. What is a biography of this devotion and profundity but repeated meetings of two souls, however separated in time, space, and spiritual dimension? In the end, each reader will have to draw his or her own conclusion as to the meaning of The Immortal Fire Within. Clues are apparent, such as the author’s wariness of the term “sixth sense,” and his touching upon the fact of “immortal fame” as merely in regard to a new astronomical discovery. Certainly the inclusion of this poetic phrase in the title does seem affirmative. “As above, so below,” recalls the anthroposophist, and thoughts of the “Macrocosm and Microcosm” enter anew into the sphere of consciousness.

The first chapter, titled Through rugged ways, describes the boyhood of Edward Barnard, who was born in Nashville, Tennessee, a place of culture and cultivation that became ravaged by the Civil War. His father died before he was born and his mother, also raising Edward’s older brother, decided to move to Nashville in hopes of finding work. Edward was born with a caul, and his mother gave him the middle name of Emerson after the New England writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson. “The dreadful privations that fell upon the South during and just following the war only intensified the misery of the impoverished Barnard family. Barnard recalled many years later that his early youth was ‘so sad and bitter that even now I cannot look back to it without a shudder.’” When Barnard was nine years old his mother obtained employment for him in the photography gallery of John H. Van Stavoren, and the boy was soon put to work running errands and guiding the immense solar camera that Van Stavoren had mounted on his studio roof. The camera was named, significantly, Jupiter. William Sheehan quotes from an autobiographical sketch by Barnard: “Through summer’s heat and winter’s cold [the boy] stood upon the roof of that house and kept the great instrument directed to the sun. It was sleepy work and required great patience and endurance for one so young, and at this distant day he realizes that this training doubtless developed those qualities — patience, care and endurance — so necessary to an astronomer’s success.” More »

Tags: astronomy, biography, book review, Edward Emerson Barnard, fire, Immortal, Life, Martha Keltz, science, William Sheehan, Work

2012-0609

The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization

Comments Off[Author: mkeltz Category: History, Reviews ]

By Jonathan Lyons

Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2009 Click to Buy this Book!

In the Prologue of The House of Wisdom, titled Al-Maghrib/Sunset, author Jonathan Lyons introduces the central themes that are carried throughout the entire book with unceasing intellectual vigor: “The power of Arab learning, championed by Adelard of Bath [c. 1080–1152], refashioned Europe’s intellectual landscape. Its reach extended into the sixteenth century and beyond, shaping the groundbreaking work of Copernicus and Galileo … Averroes, the philosopher-judge from Muslim Spain, explained classical philosophy to the West and first introduced it to rationalist thought. Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine remained a standard European text into the 1600s. Arab books on optics, chemistry, and geography were equally long-lived. The West’s willful forgetting of the Arab legacy began centuries ago, as anti-Muslim propaganda crafted in the shadow of the Crusades began to obscure any recognition of Arab culture’s profound role in the development of modern science.” A Note to Readers explains the structure of The House of Wisdom, “which pays tribute to the success of Arab scholars in measuring out the ever-changing pattern of night and day that determines the times of the five daily Muslim prayers. The book begins at sunset (al-maghrib prayer), the traditional start of the day in the Middle East; then moves through the nightfall (al-isha) of the Christian Middle Ages; recounts the dawn (al-fajr) of the great age of Arab learning; soars toward the glory of midday (al-zuhr) with our central hero, Adelard of Bath, in the Near East; and concludes with the rich colors of afternoon (al-asr) that mark the end of the Age of Faith in the West and the seemingly unstoppable triumph of Reason.” The four parts that follow the Prologue contain nine chapters. The book is not written in precise chronological order, but there is a chronological listing of Significant Events at the beginning, in addition to a list of Leading Figures, e.g., Albumazar, Boethius, Michael Scot, Ptolemy, Siger de Brabant, and Thomas Aquinas.

The House of Wisdom has a certain quality that is difficult to define and this is most likely due to its unusual structure and underlying tone of reverent enthusiasm, as well as the long, absorbing, even magical journey that it offers through heretofore unfamiliar perspectives of history, that is, from the Westerner’s point of view. Praise for The House of Wisdom includes such descriptions as “sophisticated and thoughtful; vivid and elegant; refreshing; new and important; treasure trove of information; lively and well-researched; highly recommended; complex and fascinating; riveting, breakneck pace; wonderful; clear and accessible; complex, humane and intricately beautiful.” From the Guardian: “In this clear and well-written book, Jonathan Lyons delves into all sorts of musty corners to show how Arabic science percolated into the Latin world in the Middle Ages and helped civilize a rude society.” None of this praise is exaggerated, and all reviewers would agree: educational renewal for deepening understanding of Arab history, Islam and the Muslim way of life is essential and critical in our time, in this second decade of the 21^st century and far beyond. It is hard to imagine anyone more capable than Jonathan Lyons of facilitating this process. When the initial readings of The House of Wisdom are completed, it can serve as a first-rate reference book that will never become outdated. More »

Tags: Arabs, book review, history, House of Wisdom, Jonathan Lyons, Transformed, Western Civilization, wisdom

2012-0529

The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi

Comments Off[Author: mkeltz Category: History, Reviews ]

By William J. Broad

The Penguin Press, Published by the Penguin Group, New York, 2006 Click to Buy this Book!

From the Prologue: “This book is about a voice from the remote past that has come back to question the metaphysical assumptions of our age, to urge us to look beyond the claims of science and reexamine our attitudes toward spirituality, mysticism, and the hidden powers of the mind… The Oracle is back today because a team of American scientists managed to uncover one of her greatest secrets and, in the process, to restore her reputation and voice. It turns out that she got high … Science may be our religion. But the dirty little secret, reflected in the wisdom of the Oracle, is that it is more a loose collection of insights and slogans than a universal explanation for what is real.” The prologue is clearly pointing to journalist William Broad’s realization of a dichotomy between the tenets of modern science that attribute the highest values and most meaningful experiences of the soul and spirit to physical causes only, and his awareness of the unseen spiritual foundations of all existence, an awareness that must have increased during the writing of The Oracle, especially through the research required for the earliest time periods of ancient Greece. The primary subject of the book, after it provides a clear history of the Delphic Oracle from 1000–800 BC (the author uses BCE and CE) to the time of Julian the Apostate, as well as accounts of the earliest archaeological excavations at Delphi, is a detailed biography of the geologist Jelle Zeilinga de Boer (b. mid–1930s) and his discovery of the evidence of the intoxicating hydrocarbon gases ethane, methane and ethylene that rose along the crossing faults beneath the temple, while in very minute quantities. Joining de Boer in the work of the discovery was John R. Hale, an archaeologist, Jeff Chanton, a chemist, and Henry Spiller, a medical toxicologist.

The book reflects its extensive research, with seven chapters, a Chronology, Notes, a Selected Bibliography, a Glossary, Acknowledgments and an Index. The first chapter, titled “Center of the Universe,” includes illustrations, diagrams and a map, and offers many intriguing facts, such as the meaning of the Greek word Pytho: “Python’s slaying [by Apollo], in addition to providing a dramatic narrative for Apollo’s new sanctuary, gave Delphi its other name — Pytho, from the Greek word for ‘to rot,’ a reference to the decay of the snake’s body. Pytho came to refer to the sacred region at the foot of Parnassus, while the name Delphi applied only to the sanctuary and, in time, the nearby town. The Oracle herself came to be known as the Pythia.” The Sun god, Apollo, like Saint George of later tradition, had to overcome the regional dragon, the beast of the earth, and also, to a certain degree, the beast’s power within the physical structure of the human being, in order to establish the divine impetus and direction for the coming Greco-Roman cultural age (in Anthroposophy, 747 BC to 1413 AD). More »

Tags: Ancient, book review, Delphi, Hidden, history, Lost, Message, Oracle, Secrets, William J. Broad