Free history ebook: "William the Conqueror" by Jacob Abbott will give you an in-depth overview of the life of one of England's most pivotal figures

Review by KEN KORCZAK

Enter a courtroom in the United States today, especially New England states, and you will hear the bailiff proclaim: "Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!" That's Norman French for: "Hearken! Hearken! Hearken!"

And so the titanic influence of one man, William the Conqueror, ripples across the centuries and even an ocean to display its effect today. In the year 1066, William, the Duke of Normandy, set sail across the English channel with a mighty force, marched ashore and throttled the army of the last Saxon King, Harold, thus taking the English crown and changing western world forever.

Originally published in 1877, educator Jacob Abbott writes like a kindly history teacher speaking to class of high school seniors. His style is lucid and no nonsense. He gives you the facts, but manages to flesh out enough anecdotal and incidental information to make this a bright and interesting read -- still fresh more than 100 years after it was written.

This book, and all of Abbott's "Makers of History" series, are short treatments of famous historical figures. They are must reads for those who want a deeper understanding of the incredible people who changed the world in their day, and colored all of history. About the length of short novels, I love Abbott's history books because they inform an educate, and give you a rich perspective on history, without having to wade through a lot of dry, academic textbook-like tomes.

Do yourself a favor. Brush up on your history, maybe starting with this fine little book, William the Conqueror by Jacob Abbott. You can download the free ebook here: WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

Ken Korczak is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA

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Exploration of the NDE by a maverick researcher: PMH Atwater's "Near Death Experiences" provides insights that others have missed

Review by: KEN KORCZAK

Think about this; The majority of top books about near death experiences are not written by fringy New Agers, but rather accomplished medical doctors or highly respected mainstream academicians.

Take that, skeptics!

Raymond Moody M.D. blew the doors open on the NDE issue with his monumental book Life After Life which came out in 1975. Professor and psychologist Kenneth Ring scored in 1980 with Life at Death. Of course, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross M.D. became practically the patron saint of the NDE movement, even though her ground-breaking 1969 book On Death and Dying never dealt with NDEs, per se. In fact, Kübler-Ross wanted to include this kind of information in her book, but her peers urged her not to, saying it would destroy the credibility of her book.

And they keep coming – the latest mega-best-selling NDE book is by Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon of fine reputation, credentials and pedigree. His book PROOF OF HEAVEN published in 2012 was on the New York Times best seller list for four weeks.

But now enter PMH ATWATER: She is an Idaho woman who began her career as a housewife, secretary and prize-winning county fair cook. But early on she began writing copy for the Idaho Department of Commerce and Development and then started contributing to a regional publication, Sunset magazine. In 1976 at age 39 she found herself suddenly a divorced mother of three – but the next year is when her life was shattered and changed forever.

In 1977 Atwater suffered a miscarriage which resulted in massive internal hemorrhaging. She experienced clinical death and a brief NDE. Two days later a blood clot brought her to the brink of death again, and another much more involved NDE ensued. Then about three months later a possible heart attack or stroke sent her beyond the veil one more time.This time she experienced an NDE of epic proportions.

As Atwater likes to say: “I died three times in 1977.”

She reports many of the standard features of the NDE – a journey to a heavenly realm, meeting deceased relatives, even a conversation with none other than Jesus. (Although this is not a Christian-oriented book). She also experienced the overwhelming cosmic and universal love that composes the very fabric of all reality.

These experiences were so profound it launched her on a lifetime investigation of the NDE. Even though Raymond Moody’s book had been on the shelves for a couple of years by that time, Atwater claims to have known nothing about Moody’s work or any other NDE work that had been going on at the time.

PMH Atwater

She embarked on her own research largely uninfluenced by others. Her methods were not scientific. Rather, she employed what she called “police investigation techniques.” Her father, a professional police officer, thoroughly schooled her in the investigative methodology of cops as she was growing up and frequently hanging around the police station.

To this end, Atwater interviewed (interrogated?) more than 3,000 people who claimed to have experienced their own NDEs, and so this book, her 10th on the subject, describes her theories and conclusions about NDEs.

I have taken some pains to point out that Atwater is different from others in NDE research because it suggests her work offers a fresh look at NDEs. We might consider Atwater something of a maverick within the field. This is interesting for two reasons:

1. Unlike most others in the NDE field, she is an “experiencer” herself, and thus is coming at the subject from the inside, so to speak, rather than as an outside objective observer.

2. She is not shackled by the “group think” or materialistic bias I think we can fairly attribute to the scientific community.

Of course, not being bothered by the scientific method is both a benefit and a drawback. Science has been successful because the scientific method works and brings results. (What would you rather have when the chips are really down; hands-on faith healing or a shot of penicillin?)

On the other hand, the exploration of the NDE might be one of those areas that simply isn't accessible to the scientific method; at the very least, applying a rational-materialistic overlay to the NDE may be akin to fixing your car's transmission with a roll of duct tape.

To this end, Atwater scores a couple of major body blows against scientific skeptics of the NDE, including:

• The universal acceptance of the “tunnel phenomenon.” Atwater points out that perhaps less than 10% of all NDErs report traveling through a tunnel on their way to the “other side.” Yet, the skeptics apply this tunnel experience universally to the NDE phenomenon. They say the "tunnel" can be explained by the way brain cells shut down as their oxygen supply is depleted. But as Atwater found, most people don’t experience the tunnel – how then are they still experiencing full-blown NDEs?

• The skeptic’s explanation for NDE relies heavily on the idea that an NDE is extremely brief, and that people don’t truly die during their experience, but rather, are thrust into a deep state of unconsciousness with loss of brain function. However, Atwater points out that some people who “return from the dead” do so not after a minute or two – but sometimes after several days. There are cases of people waking up on slabs while in a morgue cooler. They displayed no vital signs or brain activity for days at a time, yet they return to normal functioning.

• Severe oxygen deprivation does not always result in brain damage. Many people have been resuscitated well beyond the point where damage to the brain can be expected – yet they return without a hint of brain damage. Atwater contents the brain-oxygen connection is not well understood and is often misinterpreted by medical science.

• Scientists are coming at the issue with the assumption that all knowledge and experience is generated from within the brain – while there is good evidence from a variety of fields to suggest that knowledge and information may originate outside the brain, and the brain rather works like a radio receiver and organizer of knowledge that is “out there.”

And there’s more – including Atwater’s extremely excellent point that skeptics are failing to consider all the evidence – especially in documenting the long-term after effects of the NDE. That includes the deep personality changes that are displayed over a lifetime. Typical of science, it tends to focus in on and look too narrowly at certain factors, points of data and observed phenomenon. The method is radically reductionist– and this causes skeptics to simply disregard vast sums of data that are relevant to the overall phenomenon.

Unfortunately, Atwater in the later chapters veers off wildly into Fruitloop-O-Topia, making larger observations that, from my point of view, border on the bizarre.

For example, Atwater contends that millions of people experiencing NDEs is actually a form of consciousness evolution and is responsible for a new breed of advanced, highly intelligent children (born since 1982) emerging into our society with superior abilities. That’s complete and unsupportable nonsense.

But she makes other bizarre claims as well – such as suggesting that the downfall of Maoist China was triggered by Tangshan earthquake in 1976 which killed more than 242,000 people. Atwater contends that potentially thousands of people who survived the quake experienced NDEs and thus fueled with their expanded consciousness the transformation of China. Well, if that’s true, then Atwater must also explain why China today is veering toward large-scale environmental collapse as it pursues an aggressive, militaristic, paranoid and virulent form of hyper-capitalism that is rapidly polluting our beautiful green earth -- and on such a massive scale that it may push the entire planet to the brink of a black, gritty, dystopia.

There are other 100% inane observations as well –such as saying that Pluto has suddenly changed its color and that the other planets are also brightening – say what? – and even if this is true, how is this relevant to the NDE?

It’s not. It’s just nutty.

The good and the fascinating of NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE: THE REST OF THE STORY far outweigh the flights of fancy and the David Wilcock-like lunacy that comes forth in the final chapters.

Even so, I say you buy it and read it. It’s a significant and worthy contribution to the NDE field of literature.

Ken Korczak is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA

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Free science fiction Kindle book: Forbidden the Stars by Valmore Daniels is an enjoyable read with a few problems, but who cares? It's fun.

Review by: KEN KORCZAK

Hey, I’m an equal opportunity book reviewer. I read a lot of high class literature and an equal amount of low-brow schlock. And you know what’s interesting? I find that either category can be highly entertaining, or a depressing drag.

Upon reading FORBIDDEN THE STARS I found myself enjoying a light-weight heap of pure science fiction fun. I was joyfully carried away by this fast-pace romp across the solar system. However, after I finished the last page, all of the things that are wrong with the book began to gnaw at my critical mind, and I began to feel dirty inside.

It’s a strange feeling. It’s like, “Well, I really enjoyed that, but I shouldn't have.” But that’s ridiculous. If a writer can provide you with a few hours of enjoyment, why raise a stink? Why pick it apart? If you enjoy it – it's mission accomplished.

But seriously, I think there is more right with this book than wrong. First the good:

1. Pacing: Despite the droopy opening chapters, author VALMORE DANIELS quickly hits his stride, gets his plot in gear and this book takes off like an interstellar spaceship. Things start happening, cliff hangers get hung, problems are presented, characters strive to overcome them, and we cheer them on.

2. Good science: One of the biggest problems with most science fiction books today is that few writers are trying, or even making the merest pretense of providing some solid plausibility by including some speculative background science – speculative science that is grounded in real science.

Good “hard science fiction” should have a certain techno-geek element, and Daniels delivers that in spades. His theoretical description of a new element that can deliver faster-than-light travel is super wonky, technical, yet believable. He gets high marks on this from me. I like it when science fiction writers make an effort.

3. Plot: The plot is intricate, yet hangs together with ease. I like a complex plot, which is nevertheless easy to follow. While Daniels’ plot is highly derivative – meaning it’s not all that original -- it is well-executed.

4. Science-fictiony feel: Can is say, “science-fictiony?” Well, I just did. But you know what I mean. Those of us who dig science fiction love getting immersed in that feeling of being in a futuristic world of space ships that are flitting out and about among the planets of the solar system. There’s cool gadgetry, robotics and all that. Boffo!

Now let’s talk about the bad:

1. Characters: The characters in this book are as thin as hydrogen gas. With the slight exception of the pivotal character, young Alex Manez, the rest of the characters are bland cookie cutters that lack depth. What depth they do have is generated by one big cliché after another.

2. Unfinished business: There is a major plot element in this book that absolutely inexplicably gets left hanging. I can’t describe it because it would require a “spoiler warning.” So let me put the issue behind behind by asking this question:

“Hey, Valmore Daniels! What in the Sam hell happened to Chow Yin! I mean, seriously, what happened to him, Dude?”

There, it felt good to get that off my chest.

3. Plot: Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t I include “plot” as one of the good aspects? Yes, but I am also going to complain mightily here that the plot is highly, highly derivative. Anyone who has ever one of Ben Bova’s “Tour of the Solar System” series of books – will find this book a weak imitation of the masterful Bova style and his conception of a near-future universe where space travel is robust and developing.

4.The title: “Forbidden the Stars?” Man, that’s corny!

But – let's just admit it -- this is a terrific read that delivered a neutron-star-load of fun and entertainment for me. I loved it. Get a copy, kick back and enjoy the interplanetary ride!

(NOTE: As of this writing, this book was being offered on Amazon.com as a free Kindle selection HERE).

Ken Korczak is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA

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Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf by David Madsen is raunchy, yet beguiling; compelling, yet revolting

Review by KEN KORCZAK

Reading MEMOIRS OF A GNOSTIC DWARF made me think of “The Uncle Charles Principle.” This is when an author slips out of his omniscient view as he writes, and instead adopts the view of the character itself.

For example, if the author creates a character who is uneducated, the author might use poor grammar when writing about the character, and not just in the character’s dialog, but even while describing what the character is doing.

The Uncle Charles Principle is considered an invention of James Joyce who used the technique for a character named Uncle Charles in his 1916 book, “Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man.”

Other authors, most notably Cormac McCarthy, is said to be a master (and perhaps an over-user) of the Uncle Charles Principle.

But did DAVID MADSEN employ the Uncle Charles Principle in his rendering of this novel? Was he choosing to embody his character Peppe, the gnarled dwarf, while abandoning his own omniscient view as he wrote this fictional memoir?

I say yes because this would explain a lot, especially this book’s naive notion of Gnosticism. The Gnostic creed is presented here as a simplistic dualism – the idea that everything in the physical, material world is created by Satan – with this set against the divine light of spiritual bliss represented by the eternal perfection of God.

If you are a Gnostic, you identify yourself with the eternal light as much as you can despite being entrapped in a stinking physical body; if you are “something else” you are mired within or even accept as natural the filthy delusion of materialism. So this basic black vs. white situation is offered, yet author David Madsen (a pseudonym) identifies himself as a “theologian, philosopher and therapist.”

And that’s why I bring up the whole Uncle Charles Principle thingy – because if Madsen truly is an accomplished theologian and philosopher, then he knows that Gnosticism is deeper or at least far more variegated than as it is portrayed in this book.

In other words, the Gnosticism here should be considered that as comprehended by the character Peppe the dwarf.

Furthermore, by invoking the Uncle Charles Principle we can also indemnify the author from a Freudian-like obsession with feces, urine, sweat, blood, flatus and sexual bodily fluids, as well as persistent representation of the sex act as a kind of primeval debauchery on par with a violent attack of diarrhea.

In these pages readers will confront an onslaught of hetero- and homosexual content. At worst the sex is often shocking and violent; at best it is depicted as a moral failing. Interspersed between these episodes of human-animal copulation are persistent references to defecation, urination, sweat, bodily odors, vomit, sundry oozings, obesity and perversions, such as when Peppe’s the dwarf’s alcoholic-whore mother attempts to have sex with him.

Another example: A remarkable scene depicting a Gnostic initiation rite during which the candidates are expected to drink from a cup containing the freshly ejaculated sperm of their leader. The reader is mercifully spared the denouement of this passage – but only because the substitute is an eruption of blood-spurting violence involving the hacking of heads and arms, guttings, and torture.

This is necessarily not a plot-driven work since it is fashioned as a memoir; although there are significant subplots that help drive the narrative and makes it more than a travelogue through Renaissance Italy. Conflict is provided by the tension between the corrupt Catholic Church of and the budding Protestant reformation. An evil agent of the Inquisition also provides a delicious villain whom our heroes must escape or plot against – and finally, there is a backdrop of the ever-ongoing wars between the dominant principalities of the day.

The final chapter of Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf is an inexplicable, almost bizarre departure from the always salacious, nasty, but erudite and baroque style of the rest of the book. The end reads like a smarmy Edwardian novel dripping with high-handed sentimentality and soaring proclamations of idealized commitment, along with a dedication to pursue a trajectory of philosophical purity.

Ken Korczak is the author of: THE FAIRY REDEMPTION OF JUBAL CRANCH

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Rocket Man by William Hazelgrove is a funny, entertaining novel which will appeal to a popular audience but delivers a troubling indictment of our times

Review by KEN KORCZAK

One of our greatest writers, Joyce Carol Oates, gives us a powerful paragraph in her 1969 National Book Award winning novel “Them.” In the book, a confused former college student who flunked out of Prof. Oates’ English composition class is writing her a letter. The student writes:

You said, “Literature gives form to life.” I remember you saying that very clearly. What is form? Why is it better than the way life happens by itself? I hate all that, all those lies, so many words in all those books … But I remember you saying that about form. Form. I don’t know what that word means.

Ah yes -- “Literature gives form to life.”

That line kept drifting into my mind as I was reading ROCKET MAN by Chicago-area writer WILLIAM HAZELGROVE. But also as I read, I was thinking: “I bet this book is barely fiction at all, but rather a more-or-less spun version of real events from the author’s life.” As a matter a fact, he suggests this is somewhat the case in an afterword note to readers.

And so, like that poor student, one might ask Mr. Hazelgrove: “Why? Why is this book of fiction better than the way your life itself actually happened?”

Ms. Oates provides the answer: Because fiction brings form to life.

This is what enables William Hazelgrove to hold up a mirror not just to himself, but to all of middle class America. By making this a work of fiction, he brings it home to us all, helping bring form to our lives.

I noticed that other reviewers frequently latched onto the term “middle class angst” to describe what the author is getting at in this tale. But I think another term captures it more accurately: “Postmodern ennui.”

Websters defines ennui this way: “A feeling of weariness and disgust; dullness and languor of spirits, arising from satiety or want of interest.”

The viewpoint character of Rocket Man, Dale Hammer, meets this definition well. He is a burned out novelist mooning over the long-past glory of his three published books, now years out of print. Sailing into middle age and a mid-life crisis, he is too exhausted to write another. He also has achieved a kind materialistic satiety – even though it’s a false gratification because he gained it by taking on ruinous debt. He displays languor of spirit. He may still be obsessed with his literary career, but he has inexplicable misplaced it, like a screwdriver lost in a junk drawer.

So how about the postmodern part? Well, his psychic ennui is being brought on by his immersion in the materialistic and grotesquely avaricious nature of modern American society.

Other great writers, such as Norman Mailer, talked about this kind of stuff all the time. In a 1991 Time magazine interview, Mailer said:

We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety. Our inner lives, our inner landscape is just like that sky out there — it's full of smog. We really don't know what we believe anymore, we're nervous about everything.

Mailer was also getting at this, albeit tangentially, in his “White Negro” essay of the late 1950s. In it he says that what psychologists call “sublimation” has broken down among Americans because “proper sublimation depends on a reasonable tempo of history.” (Note: sublimation is when we transform are worst primitive traits of lust and violence into positive action for the good of society.)

William E. Hazelgrove

Mailer said our modern society is moving, changing and evolving too rapidly for sublimation to work properly. This might be the situation we see inflicted upon the protagonist of Rocket Man. He’s a good guy and innocent at his core, but the fast-madness of modern life and the constant grasping for material comforts and status is eroding his ability to sublimate his inner demons.

To this end, Dale Hammer keeps getting into small and major-sized jams. His bills are going unpaid, he is ignoring his children, he has alienated his wife to the edge of divorce. He also incites petty scrapes with the law; he sips an alcohol-laced cocktail while driving with kids in the back seat, he speeds in school zones, he bristles at even minor figures of authority. He has devolved without guilt into the role of pathetic small-time slum lord. He’s snarky, sarcastic, irresponsible and lazy.

Yet, despite all this, we can all still like him. We even root for him to triumph over the mess he has made of his life. That’s because, more than anything, we clearly see he is dazed and confused in an blameless sort of way. It’s as if he woke up one day, looked around at the train wreck of his existence, and asked himself: How did I get here? This is my life? Some kind of terrible mistake has been made!

We feel sympathy for him because we all see ourselves in Dale Hammer. So many of us have made all the same mistakes, and, like Dale Hammer, we are bewildered about how things got this way. The neo-slavery of debt? Nonstop work and stress? A country bitterly divided Left and Right? The mindless brutality of AM talk radio? This is the American Dream?

Can you believe that what I’m reviewing here is billed as a “comic novel?” Ha,ha! Well, damned if it isn't! I’m confident that 99 out of 100 readers will get big laughs from Rocket Man, even if it’s the whistling in the graveyard variety prompted by gallows humor.

As for me, I kept thinking of Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote: “I laugh because I must not cry. That is all. That is all.”

NOTE: See also my review of William Hazelgrove's latest book, THE PITCHER

Ken Korczak is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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Free ebook: Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: A Biography by K.H. Vickers is an exhaustive scholarly study that entertains and fascinates

Review by KEN KORCZAK

It’s been 600 years since he was born and lived, and we’re still talking about him. Academics continue to study him, tirelessly combing through the brittle, yellowed pages of antiquity, churning out doctoral dissertations and thesis papers – yet few can agree if he was actually “The Good Duke” or one of the most despicable figures in English history.

Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester, was the youngest son of King Henry IV, and the ever-loyal brother and lieutenant of Henry V. Born in 1390 and died in 1447, Humphrey remains among the most confounding and enigmatic personalities ever to stride across the stage of history.

Pinning down the essential nature of the Duke is a task of monumental difficulty. That’s what makes this 600-page exhaustive study of Humphrey by British Prof. Kenneth H. Vickers an extraordinary academic achievement. Vickers gave it his all. He vigorously attacks the problem of defining Humphrey page after painstaking page. He provides a voluminous bibliography of cited sources that is almost half as long as the text itself. A muscular appendix expands on additional issues.

Vickers’ conclusion? Duke Humphrey probably deserves his lasting reputation as “The Good Duke,” among certain segments of English society, high and low. However, the greater measure of the man is represented by his numerous, sometimes shocking failings.

Duke Humphrey was greedy, power mad and an ego maniac. His lusts for fame and wealth were without limit. He could be cruel and wildly impetuous, but also witty, personable and charming. He was brilliant -- yet completely unable to sustain a long-term effort – be it in war, politics or devotion to a single woman. He lived to be flattered and adored by his court of groveling sycophants; his sexual hunger for the opposite sex is legendary.

Yet, Vickers manages to uncover Duke Humphrey’s saving grace: His burning love of literature and learning. Despite his repulsive and repugnant character flaws, Vickers credits Humphrey with nothing less than bringing the Renaissance to England, and delivering his country from the cloying cobwebs of the Dark Ages. If it wasn’t for Duke Humphrey, Vickers says, England may have remained mired in ancient ignorance for decades to come.

Humphrey single-handedly thrust England out of darkness and into the light by his aggressive sponsorship of Italian intellectuals. Somewhere along the line, Humphrey developed an insatiable love of the ancient Greek and Roman texts that were exploding on the scene after being lost for centuries in medieval anti-intellectualism.

At great personal financial cost, Humphrey commissioned a small army of brilliant Italian writers and linguists to translate into Latin, French and English the works of Plato, Virgil, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Lucretius and dozens of others. These translations were sent by the hundreds to Humphrey in England where he read them with great relish – but then he breathed new life into the local academic community by donating hundreds of volumes to what had become a backward, calcified and stagnant Oxford University – the primary body of learning on the British Isles.

Today it might seem difficult to comprehend that the donation of a few hundred books could be an act of real significance; however, the printing press was still a few decades away. Books were hand-made and hand-lettered by scribes. The production of a single book involved hundreds of man-hours – and those who were literate enough to do the job were rare members of society indeed. Thus, books were objects of rarity and enormous value.

"THE GOOD DUKE"

Also, consider that no one – perhaps not so much as a single person –in England was capable of reading -- not to mention translating -- ancient classical Greek. For this, Duke Humphrey had to rely on the distant Humanist scholars of Italy. Merely the logistics of finding them, contacting them, making deals with them and arranging for translated books to be shipped to England was a remarkable undertaking. No one else was interested in doing it. It was Duke Humphrey who made it happen.

The historic effect of this effort is still rippling through British society today, Vickers claims (keeping in mind this book was first published in 1907). Thus, it would be impossible to overestimate the service The Good Duke paid to all of Britain.

But, ah, alas, despite this priceless everlasting boon bequeathed upon the Sceptered Isles by the hand of Humphrey, the rotting stench which clings to his reputation can never be scrubbed clean – nor should it be.

It was his lifelong, undying and illogical support of his brother’s war with France, especially after it was hopelessly and utterly lost, which brought untold tragedy to both realms, not the least of which is the unimaginable suffering inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of common peasants of the French countryside.

If this wasn’t enough, Duke Humphrey’s fantastically insane decision to march an English army to Hainault (or Hainaut) after his semi-legitimate marriage to Jacqueline, Countess of Holland, so that he could claim what he deemed to be his – represents one of the most egregiously rash and ill-advised military blunders of all time. This action also unleashed monstrous cruelties of war upon a land of industrious, innocent, peaceful people who wanted nothing of England but to be left alone.

It was all so unnecessary! The Hainault campaign drained vast sums of treasure from the English coffers, wreaked hideous brutalities upon the prosperous people of The Low Countries– raping, pillaging, killing, burning, ravaging, destruction of cattle and crops – all for the insipid whims and greed of Humphrey!

Today’s historians owe an enormous debt to Professor Kenneth Hotham Vickers for this extraordinary manuscript. Before Vickers brought out this volume more than a century ago, there was yawning gap in the modern record. The life and deeds of one of England’s most prominent princes was languishing in the obscurity of dusty archives.

I made a considerable attempt to find out more about Kenneth Vickers, but precious little is available, at least on the Internet. But perhaps it is fitting that a man who devoted his life to the study and teaching of history be remembered by a great work of history – and Humphrey Duke of Gloucester serves as a magnificent legacy for an exceptional scholar.

NOTE: You can download a free copy of this book here: HUMPHREY

Ken Korczak is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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"Aliens in the Backyard" by Trish and Rob MacGregor is a well-written, terrific contribution to UFO literature and lore that will keep you turning pages

Review by: KEN KORCZAK

You know that old adage: “Call a man a dog once and you insult him; call him a dog a thousand times and he may start barking.”

Well, that's the effect I get when I read one UFO book after another. After five or six of these things, I find myself thinking: “Well, by golly, maybe we really are being visited by aliens, alternate dimensional beings, intruders from a parallel universe – or just whatever the hell they are.”

That might be the case for you too when you read a well-written, infectiously compelling book such as this one, ALIENS IN THE BACKYARD by TRISH AND ROB MACGREGOR.

Both authors are seasoned veterans at writing about the UFO phenomenon, cutting their teeth by reporting for that spectacular glossy publication of the 1980s, OMNI Magazine.

The MacGregors are not only well-trucked in UFO literature; they are accomplished and prolific fiction novelists. That means they bring highly polished wordsmithing skills to crafting highly controversial nonfiction. So skeptics beware -- these writers can pull you in.

The MacGregors focus on four individual cases of real people who encountered the unimaginably strange, and then struggled mightily to come to grips with the eschatological shock of having their paradigms shattered. The authors do a marvelous job of presenting these accounts as believable, captivating – and frightening.

These four case studies serve as a platform for the authors to expand on other aspects of UFO phenomenon. They include some of their personal investigations, such as their travels to the Chilean island of Chiloe, where centuries of fabulous legend combine with the modern elements of “alien” abductions and apparitions. It’s interesting stuff.

But, you know, an integral element of ufology is that it naturally produces confusion, confounding contradictions and a tendency for the discussion to devolve into the ridiculous. With that in mind, there are a couple of areas where the MacGregors fall prey to those notorious bugaboos of UFO lore – conspiracy theories and apocalyptic scenarios.

A major buzzword in ufology today is “Disclosure.” This speaks to the idea that the U.S. government – and apparently with the cooperation of all other world governments, who can’t cooperate on anything else – know the truth about UFOs and aliens, and they’re all colluding to hide the astounding truth from the public.

And so there is a movement among ufologists to demand “Disclosure.” That is, they insist that governments finally come clean, tell us what they know, and stop hiding the most important story in human history from all of us, the common rabble.

All of this is patently ridiculous.

I can criticize the Disclosure nonsense on many levels. I partially did so in my review of Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel’s book A.D. After Disclosure (see my review here: DISCLOSURE REVIEW) The authors reference Dolan and Zybel to their detriment.

I have other quibbles as well.

The authors trot out – yet again -- the purely asinine quotes of Ronald Reagan regarding alien life from other planets. You know, Ronald Reagan, the President who said that air pollution is caused by trees, a year’s waste from a nuclear power plant could be stored “under a desk,” and that he didn’t know enough about astrology to understand if it was real or not. (This after it was revealed his wife was consulting with an astrologer to help plan the schedule of the President of the United States).

Ronald Reagan spewed all kinds of shoot-from-the-hips folksy quips and quotes (including unwittingly saying into a live mike that he would start bombing the Soviet Union “in 10 minutes”) – yet UFO folks have latched on to his comments about aliens as if they were the most hallowed of “smoking gun” slips. It’s absurd.

Trish and Rob MacGregor

They also drag out – yet again – Jimmy Carter’s 1969 UFO sighting, which is the thinnest of thin gruel indeed. As an extremely experienced amateur astronomer, and after reading reams of pages about the Carter sighting, I am 100% convinced that he saw the planet Venus – as do most others – including other UFO researchers. The people who were with Carter on that day also think it ridiculous to suggest that what they all saw was a “real UFO.” It just wasn’t that impressive.

The authors make a lot of hay about statistics which show that millions of people believe that UFOs and aliens are real – but this is meaningless. A recent poll showed that as much as 52% of people in some areas of the Deep South believe that President Barack Obama is a Muslim. This does not make Obama a Muslim – it just means that millions of people are easily deluded.

Other aspects of the book trouble me as well – such as the marvelous psychics the authors seem to have access to. For example, in one case, they bring to a psychic a vial of holy water that an abductee has been carrying around in his pocket to frustrate “evil beings” that continue to torment him after a bizarre visitation event.

With a mere touch of the vial, the psychic is able to spin off astounding detail about the situation of the owner. She provides a detailed analysis which matches almost point by point the scenario that is vexing the "experiencer."

All this is well and good – but it can’t help but make me think – with psychics of such astounding clarity of vision out there – why then can’t they turn their penetrating powers on some of the other UFO mysteries that the authors are concerned about?

Why, for example, can’t these obviously marvelously gifted psychics get to the bottom of the Disclosure issue? Why can’t they ferret out details of what the government knows, or who knows what, and provide at least decent clues to investigative journalists -- to help them gain some traction on the government cover-up issue? But they never seem to apply their amazing powers in this way.

Quibbles aside – the closing impression I want to leave is that this is among the best UFO books I have read in a long time. The areas of concern I mention are relatively minor compared to the overall information Rob and Trish MacGregor present in these pages.

My judgment of the authors is that they are sincere, thorough, and intelligent. They are even more balanced in their approach many other UFO writers I have read recently. Aliens In The Back Yard is a fascinating, well-written, highly entertaining read.

Ken Korczak is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA

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"This Is Me, Jack Vance!" is a remarkable autobiography by a remarkable writer

Review by KEN KORCZAK

Over the past 30 years I have read just about everything Jack Vance has written – many dozens of books – and, yes, I have re-read most of them multiple times. I know there are five or six of his titles I have read 15 or 20 times each – I’m not kidding – and each read and re-read is always pure unadulterated joy.

Vance is a writer of strange power; he is a unique phenomenon in literature. There was never another writer like him before, and there will never be another like him again. The science fiction writer Robert Silverberg said other writers have occasionally tried to imitate Vance “only to embarrass themselves or find it impossible.”

And yet, while it can’t be said that Vance is an obscure writer, in his long career he never approached the fame and recognition of his fellow genre artists, such as Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov. He won every major award in science fiction, including the Hugo and Nebula multiple times – as he also did in another genre, detective novels and murder mysteries. But true fame eluded him – and that was probably okay with him.

Writer Michael Chabon said of Vance: "Jack Vance is the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don't get the credit they deserve. If The Last Castle or The Dragon Masters had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it would be received as a profound meditation, but because he's Jack Vance and published in Amazing Whatever, there's this insurmountable barrier."

Of Vance's place in American literary tradition, Chabon said: “It's not Twain-Hemingway; it's more Poe's tradition, a blend of European refinement with brawling, two-fisted frontier spirit."

The immensely popular Neil Gaiman read his first Vance tale at age 13. He said: "I fell in love with the prose style. It was elegant, intelligent; each word felt like it knew what it was doing. It's funny but never, ever once nudges you in the ribs." Gaiman credits Vance with his own desire to become a writer.

One of the reasons Vance never became as revered as a Mark Twain or as popular as a Ray Bradbury is that his style can be (or seem) challenging. Over the years, I’ve heard dozens of my friends say, “I really tried to get into Vance, but I always found myself dropping out of his books after two or three chapters.” On the other hand, Vance certainly has legions of fans, and may be more popular in Europe than the United States.

Vance published this biography, THIS IS ME, JACK VANCE! at about age 95. As of this writing, he is 97. He has been blind for more than 20 years, and the loss of his eyesight eventually forced him to stop writing – even though he completed some of his best works after his eyes failed, including the marvelous Lyoness series and “Night Lamp,” the latter of which is a near masterpiece.

Because of his blindness, Vance was obligated to write his biography by dictation, a process with which he was not familiar or comfortable, and he says so at the beginning.

Norma and Jack Vance

What interesting is that this is a biography of a great writer which contains almost nothing about writing at all. He provides about three pages of commentary about writing near the end of the book, and then he only did so at the insistence of his agent and editors.

The majority of the book is devoted to his passions for life: traveling around the world on a shoestring budget; restaurants serving great food wines, liquors and whiskeys; the world's oceans and sailing; carpentering his home in Oakland from the ground up. Last but not least, and his most ardent passion of all – jazz.

Vance says that his wife, Norma, was an indispensable part of everything he wrote. Their method was to cloister together in a room. Using a fountain pen and notepad, Jack would churn out 2,000 to 3,000 words per day. Norma would type and edit his drafts. Jack would then pore over the first typed version and make changes. Norma would then retype the manuscript – and they sent it off to publishers – all of whom were eager to print whatever they could get with the name “Jack Vance” on the byline.

Ah – but what rooms they worked in! A cabin in rural Ireland, a cottage in Tahiti, a balcony room by the sea in an Italian hotel, a houseboat parked on Nageen Lake in Kashmir, a campsite tent in Zimbabwe, an Oceanside apartment in Australia, a rented house in Mexico – the travels of Jack and Norma (and later with their young son, John), left me astounded!

So this is a biography quite unlike any other – iconoclastic, completely unconcerned with commercial appeal or popularity, unpretentious, humble, filled with terrific, entertaining anecdotes – the last remarkable work of one of the most remarkable writers of all time.

Ken Korczak is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA

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"The Trail of Money" by Peter David Shapiro has a complex plot but which strays frequently off trail to get mired in thickets of niggling detail

Review by KEN KORCZAK

Imagine the hero of a thriller novel who is some white collar business consultant. His job is to pore over balance sheets, crunch numbers, examine reports, look for accounting errors and scrutinize the legal aspects of corporate transactions. Sound exciting?

Okay, not really -- but wait a minute - what if our handsome consultant gets caught up in a nefarious game of international intrigue? There's money laundering, mobsters, corrupt government officials, hired thugs, exotic-erotic women, murderers, evil millionaires - all these elements are seething in the urban-money-and-poverty pit of Hong Kong.

Well, those are the components of THE TRAIL OF MONEY by PETER DAVID SHAPIRO - and although he has all the ingredients for a compelling pot boiler - this novel feels more like a bottle of carbonated water with a loose cap. All the potential pop of a great plot fizzles away.

And here's why:

As the terrific writer Ben Bova advised, "All fiction is based on character." The characters in this novel simply are not fleshed out enough. Yes, we learn that Dr. Harry West has suffered the death of his daughter and a resulting divorce. This should add depth and dimension to the character, and forge empathy for him among readers, right?

Well, giving the viewpoint character a dead wife or child has become so common, especially among new writers, it now has entered the realm "plot gimmick" if not an outright cliché. Just in the past 50 books I have read, the following authors supplied their hero with a deceased spouse and/or child: John Connolly (dead wife and child), Stephen Ames Berry (dead wife), Paul Antony Jones (killed own child in accident), Michael R. Hicks (dead wife), Richard Brown (dead wife), James LePore (hero has a dead wife; his new love interest has a dead husband), Nathan Lee Christensen (dead wife) - and those are the one I can think of just off the top of my head - so easily more than 10% of the fast 50 books I have read.

Granted, I read more than 100 books per year, and this new dead wife/child trend may be invisible to the casual reader - but, well -- I'll let my reader decide if I am being fair in this regard, or if I am merely finding picayune fault.

But beyond that, what does our hero, Harry West, look like? I think he looks like a 30ish Harrison Ford, but you might disagree - you might think he looks like Vince Vaughn. Maybe he looks like your friend Charlie from college. We don't know because he is never described. Apparently, he a thirty-something white guy (I think) with a Ph.D.

By chance, Mr. West meets his future love interest on a jet ride over to Hong Kong. By fantastic coincidence, she is seated right next to him. She just happens to be a journalist who just happens to be, by more coincidence, reporting on the very project Mr. West is flying to Hong Kong to examine. Here is how we are introduced to her:

"She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, slim, good-looking with red hair cut short gamine style."

As it happens, the novel I read just prior to this one was an obscure 1960 science fiction pulp job, but it also featured a sexy redhead as a primary character. Here is how that author, Richard Wilson, introduced us to a woman his hero meets on a train:

"The girl's hair was a subtle red, but false. When Don had entered the club car he'd seen her hatless head from above and noticed that the hair along the part was dark. The cheeks were full and untouched by make-up. There were lines at the corners of her mouth which indicated a tendency to arrange her expression into one of disapproval. The lips were full, like the cheeks, but it was obvious that the scarlet lipstick had contrived a mouth a trifle bigger that the one nature had given her." (From: AND THEN THE TOWN TOOK OFF, Ace Double, 1960)

PETER DAVID SHAPIRO

And the latter is from a hacked out piece of pulp fiction! I ask the reader, which character comes alive more for you? Which is more vivid, more interesting? And, hey - the second description is only a few extra sentences! In a novel-length manuscript, that's perfectly reasonable, even if the author is trying to write extremely tight.

Most of the other characters are as bland - they're mannequins dressed in suits with a lot of blanks for readers to fill in - and not just because we don't get treated to physical description - it's because they don't do or say much that clearly makes them unique, quirky individuals.

But a far greater problem for me is what I am going to call a certain rather odd GPS Effect - that is, the author is constantly giving us the niggling details of streets, plazas, locations, taxi routes, train connections, boat harbor routes, highways and walkways.

Even in a flashback describing a romantic adventure between two carefree post-college hitchers - the GPS device is constantly bip-bip-bipping in the background, as in:

"We stood together silently in front of a poster for Madame Tussauds Wax Museum on Marylebone Road next to the entrance to the Baker Street Underground station, where Mei-Ling would catch the Bakerloo Line to Piccadilly, and then transfer onto the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow Airport."

Nice to know how she'll be getting to the airport - I guess.

Furthermore, the author again and again injects the narrative with repetitive details which rob his story of tension. For example, sometime a character will summarize what the cops just told him for another character - even though we the readers already know it all - and we have to hear it all again.

Even during a passionate love scene, we simply must pause for a detailed description of the bathroom fixtures:

"The (hotel) had outfitted the shower with both the overhead sprayer and a second nozzle on a flexible stainless steel hose coiled on a hook just under the faucets. Guests could select either nozzle or both at the same time by swiveling a lever. The outer edge of the tub, opposite the wall, was two feet high and wide enough to accommodate indented seats that were carved into it. A light nylon shower curtain could be pulled along the outer edge to protect the rest of the bathroom from the spray."

The action of wet and steamy love scene is interrupted right in the middle - I'm not kidding - so that we can get this description of the tub and shower stall.

I have other quibbles as well. I hate it when writers reference pop culture in their narratives. (On the plane Dr. West watches "The Wedding Crashers," and in his hotel, he watches a Bruce Willis movie). This has the effect of yanking me right out of a fictional world back into our own mundane world of trash culture. (I read literature to escape from cultural trash, not to be reminded of it).

Despite all, the Trail of Money has an excellent, well-conceived plot. Let me tell you, it takes an enormous amount of writing skill to hatch a scenario such as offered here - I give the author colossal credit for being a brilliant strategic thinker in terms of crafting an air-tight scenario that never contradicts itself.

I say completely without guile, that I believe Peter David Shapiro to be a writer of fierce talent with a fine literary mind - I absolutely will be looking forward to and buying his future books, and I bet each one will be better than the last.

Ken Korczak is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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Free Science Fiction ebook: "The Memory of Mars" by Raymond F. Jones is a long short story that rises above the space opera of the early 1960s

Review By KEN KORCZAK

Imagine this: You first met your wife way back in grade school, in the third grade. You grew up together in a small town. You were high school sweethearts, then married and shared years of a happy life. Your wife is suddenly seriously injured in a car accident. The surgeons in the operating room are shocked to discover that she is not a human being. Inside, they find no heart, lungs, stomach, but a mass of weird green organs -- she's an alien.

Sound like a sizzling scenario for a great science fiction yarn? It is, and RAYMOND F. JONES takes a great idea and leads his readers through a confounding mystery that will have you turning the pages, believe me.

THE MEMORY OF MARS (CLICK TO GET FREE) is an example of early 1960s pulp science fiction that rises above the standard space opera schlock that filled many of these publications, in this case, the December 1961 issue of Amazing Stories.

This story preceded by five years Philip K. Dick's masterful short story, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Both stories bear a similar premise - a man who is struggling with real or unreal bizarre memories of events that occurred on a vacation to Mars - that may or may not have happened!

In the hands of Philip Dick the story is a bona fide work of genius. In the case of The Memory of Mars and author Raymond Jones, the story is good - but, well it doesn't rise to that exulted level.

Although The Memory of Mars is a terrific piece it falters badly in the denouement. It almost seems like the author realized that he had written himself into a corner by spinning an extremely cunning tale.

Thus, to resolve the mystery of the story - he punts. He opts for a standard plot gimmick - he introduces a new character near the end of the story who conveniently steps in to explain everything. For me, it was a letdown.

Instead of the hero using his intelligence, bravery and cleverness to wrench a solution to his problem through intense action, everything is finally handed to him on a plate. Furthermore, part of the explanation - of how his wife could be an alien and why he has strange memories -- is a science fiction cliché - I won't tell you what it is because I don't want to spoil the ending for you.

Certainly some may disagree with how I feel about the ending, and there is an additional final twist that is wonderful. The Memory of Mars is an example of sci-fi pulp that rises well above the standard of the genre. It's more than worth your time and a read.

Ken Korczak is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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Free science fiction ebook "And Then The Town Took Off" by Richard Wilson is barely entertaining, thin on plot, but may amuse some readers

Review By KEN KORCZAK

Sometimes when I read a science fiction novel I think about what Kurt Vonnegut said: “Science fiction is the urinal of literature.”

That's the vibe I got about half-way through AND THEN THE TOWN TOOK OFF by RICHARD WILSON. It was issued as one-side of an Ace Double in 1960. Back then a writer could submit a manuscript that was little more than farcical drivel, get it published, earn a few hundred dollars and gain traction in the writing business.

Richard Wilson did – gain some traction, that is -- he later won one of science fiction’s highest honors, The Nebula Award. He also was nominated for the supreme SF honor, the Hugo.

I bet he didn't get many accolades for this yarn even though it has an intriguing premise: A small town of 3,000 people in Ohio suddenly finds itself uprooted from the earth and levitating high into the earth’s atmosphere.

Yet, this is far from an original idea at the time. James Blish had already published at least two of his “Cities in Flight” novels by the late 1950s, and Wilson seems to have merely commandeered the same idea and played his version for laughs, whereas Blish’s books were hard science fiction – and with a lot of technical scientific speculation to boot.

I’ve already hinted at the major problem with And Then The Town Took Off – there’s a premise, but little in the way of plot. Rather, the novel plays out as a series of zany reactions by the resident of Superior, Ohio, to their extraordinary situation. When it finally comes time to explain how the town was levitated, we don’t even get treated to the thrill of the characters taking action to solve their own mystery. The 'Big Reveal' about why everything is happening is not clever either.

Instead, Wilson resorts to “magical explanations” thinly disguised as elements of science fiction, as in: The aliens did it. They can perform any miracle they want with super advanced science. Wilson and his editors felt no need to make it plausible. Furthermore, the aliens are meddling with earth’s cities for a reason that was already a hackneyed plot device by 1960 – their own planet was destroyed by a nova so they had to going roaming the stars to find a new home.

One positive aspect of the novel is Wilson’s talent at creating vivid, likable characters – something so many writers of today seem to have forgotten. For example, here is how Wilson introduces us to one of two potential love interests he supplies for his main character, Don Cort. He he first encounters her on a passenger train:

“The girl’s hair was a subtle red, but false. When Don had entered the club car he’d seen her hatless head from above and noticed that the hair along the part was dark. Her eyes had been on a book and Don had the opportunity for a brief study of her face. The cheeks were full and untouched by make-up. There were lines at the corners of her mouth which indicated a tendency to arrange her expression into disapproval. The lips were full, like the cheeks, but it was obvious that scarlet lipstick had contrived a mouth a trifle bigger than the one nature had given her.”

That’s pretty good – as is her name – Geneva “Jen” Jarvis.

Since this book is free – and short – I still say it is worth a read, if only for the delightful characters. Also, it gave me that certain happy nostalgic feeling for a simpler time when America was more uniformally prosperous and less complicated -- back when a hack writer could sit down at a battered typewriter, clack out a one-draft space opera and sell it to a decent publisher.

Ken Korczak is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA

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The Way of Wyrd by Brian Bates is a magical book that captures the ancient spirit of pagan Saxons, even if it may not be entirely authentic

Review by KEN KORCZAK

Over the past couple of years I’ve occasionally seen mention of a book called THE WAY OF WYRD by BRIAN BATES on sites such as Facebook and other online forums. It was one such prompting that motivated me to investigate what this book is about. I was surprised to discover it was published 30 years ago in 1983.

After reading The Way of Wyrd, I can understand its enduring popularity and the fond and even reverential praise it garners from fans.

This is a fictional tale centered on Anglo-Saxon pagan spiritual teachings and mythology. The year is 674 A.D. It tells the story of a Christian monk from England who is sent to some location on the European mainland so that he can study the gods of the Saxons. His purpose is what was always the purpose of Christians of that era – to find out just enough about the ancient pagan systems so that they could wipe it out and displace it with Christianity.

The young monk who gets the assignment is the humble and meek Wat Brand. Shortly after arriving in Saxon territory, he meets a shaman of extraordinary wisdom and power. This Saxon sorcerer, Wulf, immediately agrees to teach brand everything he can about the power of the pagan gods and spirits. The book plays out as a kind of master-student series of lessons in Saxon spirituality.

There is a spectacular amount of magical activity among the blissful natural setting of an unspoiled European forest. This combination of magic couched within skillful descriptions of sparkling rivers, pungent green forests and dramatic mountain landscapes appeals to those of us who long for an increasingly lost, pristine planet -- long before earth was tainted by the pollution and ravages of the Industrial Age.

Either by design or by accident, the author benefits from the aura of J.R.R Tolkien. He chooses to call the land of the Saxons “Middle-Earth” which leverages the magic of The Lord of Rings. It’s true that Tolkien didn’t exactly invent the term Middle Earth, but he might as well have. Tolkien was the first to popularize Middle Earth as a modern description for what the ancients referred to as Midgard, Middenheim, Manaheim, or Middengeard.

Tolkien first encountered the term in 1914 when pouring over rare fragments of centuries old documents. He found this line by the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf:

Éala éarendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended.

Which translates to:

Hail Earendel, brightest of angels / above the middle-earth sent unto men.

Before Tolkien, no one was using Middle Earth as a popular description of pre-Chrisitian Europe, but now it’s fair game for all.

Brian Bates

While I enjoyed nearly every page of The Way of Wyrd and give it my top recommendation, I think the criticisms of how Saxon spirituality is portrayed are fair. Many question the authenticity of the presentation. The Way of the Wyrd reads as much (or more) like a modern New Age conception of magic as it does a scholarly documentation of what the pagan Saxons actually believed and practiced.

In the introduction of the book, Bates makes a strenuous case that his work is a faithful and accurate rendering of Saxon magic. He says his narrative is based on a 1,000-year-old manuscript written by a Christian monk who serves as the model for his character Wat Brand. He also sites a lengthy bibliography of resources.

But I say, no way. Granted, I’m not an expert in pagan spiritual practices, but my strong impression here is that the author granted himself copious poetic license and overlaid much of this with his own modern interpretations.

Also – the structure of the narrative is one that is tried, true and familiar – the story plays out as a series of lessons between master and student, the same vehicle that Carlos Castaneda used to churn out his best-selling (and phony) series of tales of a sorcerer and his apprentice. Richard Bach also used this structure in Illusions – as did many other authors – all of which hearken back to the Platonic dialogue developed in ancient Greece.

There’s nothing wrong with adopting this formula; it’s just that, Brian Bates is obviously a crafty writer who knows how to write a crowd-pleasing yarn – leverage a little Tolkien, execute the tale with a time-tested formula, and take as many liberties as you need to make the information appeal to a modern New Agey audience.

Good for him, I say, because we’re all winners. The Way of Wyrd is a beautiful book which has bolstered interest in the ancient pagan beliefs of Northern Europe – and those beliefs were more sane and sound than what passes for modern mainstream religion today.

Ken Korczak is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA

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"We, The Drowned" by Danish writer Carsten Jensen is an epic masterpiece in the tradition of Melville, but rendered in a modern style that's darkly funny, often disturbing but always accessible

Review by KEN KORCZAK

After the first chapter of WE, THE DROWNED, my impression was that I was reading a book by an author who is a basically a Danish version of our own Garrison Keillor here in Minnesota –a local guy offering folksy, funny, sometimes pithy tales of small town Scandinavians.

But the farcical beginning quickly gives way to a violent, bloody realism. Author CARSTEN JENSEN describes a horrific naval battle between a Danish ship and a battery of German artillery. There’s exploding bodies, gore, death and dismemberment, shock and anguish, followed by the psychological devastation and numbing humility of POW captivity.

And yet – mixed in with the realism is an element of the supernatural and dark comedy – but the mysticism is subtle and in the background. Both the realism and esoterica are handled with a cynical and sardonic humor that makes you wonder what the author is really trying to say.

We, The Drowned tells the story of the tiny village of Marstal, which located on Ærø Island in the south of Denmark. (It’s a real place, although this is fiction). The story begins in 1848 and documents the life of the community through 1945. Marstal life has basically one vocation – seamanship. Every other occupation, from farming and blacksmithing, to local grocery and clothing stores, revolve around serving the values of sailors, ships and the sea.

The story begins and ends with war -- the Danish-German First Schleswig War of 1848 and World War II. The vast middle of the novel, however, is not about war. Rather, it follows the individual lives of a selection of fictional citizens of Marstal. And it’s not just about sailing either.

Jensen devotes long sections to the life of Ærø Island boys – their impossibly Byzantine education in schools where severe corporeal punishment seems to be the entire purpose of primary education. The free-time of childhood is spent roaming the island as gangs of trouble makers. Just about all of the boys live without fathers most of the time – the dads are always away at sea. The sometimes comical, often brutal activities of youth are attempts to become men on their own, without the guidance of fathers.

I emphasize school-age “boys” because girls are all but absent from this tale. An adult woman take the stage in a supporting role about half-way through, but this is basically a book about boys and men – although I will say that women play a supporting role in a way that that at least acknowledges their influence in Marstal's universe.

Carsten Jensen

I occurs to me that out of the more than 100 books I have read in the previous year, this 700-page epic is the most difficult of them all to review. It’s maddeningly difficult to pin down the essential soul of the book. (This is also what makes it a joy to read).

Here you’ll find page after page of delightful dark humor, but which gives way to black comedy that cries out at the meaninglessness of life. The characters often find themselves literally adrift or blown off course on an uncaring sea that feels free to kill them at random. The sea serves as the ultimate metaphor for the existential nightmare that is the fate of all mankind – a place where a caring God or rational explanation for life is entirely absent.

Jensen portrays human beings as greedy, lust-driven, violent pawns tossed about by the whims of fate -- yet, he offers subtle hints that a higher order may be guiding the human race after all. In the darkest of times, the characters are sometimes granted glimpses of love and hope, especially if they act with courage and selfless bravery – but they just as often meet grotesque and horrifying fates – even when trying to behave with higher moral purpose.

Let me sum up this way: This book has the flavor of classics such as Herman Melville's “Moby Dick” and Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey” –but rendered with a thoroughly modern literary approach that most closely resembles that of Kurt Vonnegut (especially his Slaughterhouse Five). Then throw in equally hefty portions of Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ole Rølvaag – and you get We, The Drowned.

Ken Korczak is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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The Orange Girl by Sir Walter Besant, published 1899, is a rambling, wordy book with familiar themes of the era and will probably bore most readers

Review by KEN KORCZAK

This book by a 19th century British author reflects many of the themes one would expect in the era of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy:

Kind-hearted but achingly poor folks being preyed upon by greedy businessmen and corrupt lawyers; lovely pure-hearted maidens; the filthy mean streets of London teaming with pickpockets, rogues and criminals; the absurd horrors of debtors prisons - but underlying it all, an avenue of escape promised by an overriding belief that there is a higher good, and a few well-placed saintly people determined to uplift the lowly.

What was surprising to me, however, was the tedious, disjointed and verbose rendering of this over-long novel. The writer is Sir Walter Besant, a bona fide scholar, intellectual and prolific author. Yet with The Orange Girl, he delivers a rambling mess of a work that is repetitive, pandering and ludicrously mawkish.

The story revolves around Will Halliday, a young man whose father is one of London's richest shipping merchants. Halliday is expected to take over his father's empire, but young Will becomes enamored with the fiddle. He desires the life of a musician. To his family, a musician is a step above a common footpad. Young Will chooses music anyway, is disowned, and is thrust into a life hovering at the edge of poverty.

The plot thickens when Will's father dies and implements a real twist in his will - he leaves £100,000 to either his son or his nephew - based on which one dies first. If the poor musician outlives his cousin, he gets the fortune. If his cousin, the avaricious Matthew Halliday, who remained in the family business, lives longer, he claims the loot.

To make a long story short - a very long story - the matter of the inheritance attracts greedy lawyers, criminals and sundry troublemakers who hover around the fate of the unclaimed fortune like flies around a steaming pile of manure. They all scheme to make the life of the innocent fiddle player Will Halliday a living hell.

So who is the "Orange Girl?" That would be Jenny Wilmot, a blissfully beautiful, overpoweringly lovely and magnificently gorgeous goddess of a woman who is the purest of pure saints - so virtuous she is willing to sacrifice anything and everything for the sake and comfort of her fellow man. She crosses paths with Will Halliday, gets entangled in his life - and so the plot plays out.

The character of Jenny Wilmot is modeled on the real-life 17th Century British actress Nell Gwyn, and something of a folk heroine who also happened to be the mistress of King Charles II.

By the way, an Orange Girl is a young woman who worked the crowds at theaters or other public events. They carry baskets of oranges and either give them out for free or sell them for pennies. They do so while dressed as risqué and revealingly as the stilted 18th or 19th Century British society allowed - they are like an Elizabethan version of a Hooter's waitress - although the Orange Girl enjoys a status more akin to a prostitute.

I have a theory as to why Sir Besant managed to deliver such a substandard heap of fiction, but since zero out of zero readers of this review have made it this far, I'll just end it here by saying that "The Orange Girl" is not a work destined to be a classic, but a work destined to be forgotten.

Download a free copy of The Orange Girl here: THE ORANGE GIRL

Ken Korczak is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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"The Last Frontier" by Julia Assante is a book much needed today because our society is obsessed with death in a negative, macabre and destructive way

Review by KEN KORCZAK

This book recommends that everyone speak to the dead, and I agree. I’ll be blunt: I’ve tried speaking to the dead, and I’m happy to report that it works. And, yes they talk back. If a cynical, hard-headed skeptic like me who loves empirical science and rational thought can speak to the dead and gain value from it, then anyone can.

Not only is it possible to speak to the dead, but it will make you feel absolutely on top of the world. I’m not kidding. Having a conversation with a dead loved one – or any deceased person – is like undergoing a terrific psychological cleansing. It’s amazingly uplifting.

Even if you absolutely cannot believe that the dead live on somehow -- on another plane or in some kind of afterlife -- and even if you are the ultimate rational atheist, you can still benefit greatly from speaking to the dead. If you don’t believe me, try it. Maybe you are a super rational, empirical materialist -- I still dare you – I double dog dare you – to use some of the methods this author, JULIA ASSANTE suggests for contacting the dead.

So this is a pretty terrific book. What I like about it most is the author’s dogged insistence that the issue of death should be a positive and uplifting subject in our society. Death, dying and being dead is something which should be stripped of the fear and sense of the macabre our mainstream culture has overlaid it with. As the author says, our two greatest achievements in life are probably being born and dying – and death is definitely not the end.

Julia Assante, Ph.D.

Here, now, I will air some quibbles I have with this book:

First, the author gives a vigorous and breathless endorsement of the Spiricom device – an electronic contraption which supposedly enabled a man by the name of William O’Neil to contact the deceased American physicist, Dr. George Mueller.

O'Neil recorded an amazing 20 hours of two-way conversation with the deceased Dr. Mueller. The Spiricom was bankrolled by a wealthy inventor and industrialist, George Meek, who was said to have revolutionized the air-conditioning industry, and got rich on his numerous patents.

To make a long story short, the Spiricom experiment has been all-but proven to be a hoax – and it was probably a hoax perpetrated by William O’Neil. Even George Meek was hoodwinked. The Spiricom device worked only once – and only for Mr. O’Neil. After that, the contrivance was passed from hand to hand, and owner to owner, and not a single other person was able to make the heap work, much less contact a famous dead scientist.

William O’Neil was known to have been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia – it’s listed on his death certificate. Remember, the Spiricom worked for O’Neil and O’Neil only.

It was also the case that O’Neil had some financial interest in making the Spiricom work. He was being bankrolled by the wealthy George Meek. Success with the Spiricom meant that the gravy train could keep rolling for O’Neil – and O’Neil needed the money. He was living in a burned out shell of a decrepit old house at the time.

Now get this: O’Neil was a self-proclaimed psychic and medium, but he also was well known to be a performing ventriloquist. That’s right! And not only was William O’Neil a schizophrenic ventriloquist, it was also known that he owned what is called an “electronic-larynx” device – this was a small microphone worn at the throat that could help a ventriloquist “throw” his voice –and also make his voice sound totally different. It gives the voice a kind of electrical-robotic sound – as was the quality of the voice of the supposedly eager to communicate and dead Dr. George Mueller.

Interestingly, O’Neil never allowed himself to be photographed from the front while using the Spiricom – was it so that he could hide the fact he was wearing and electronic larynx? I ask readers to add up all the evidence and and draw their own conclusion.

I bring this up because the author should have known better than to endorse the legacy of the Spiricom. She holds a Ph.D and thus must be well familiar with not only citing sources, but vetting those sources for accuracy. She stumbles here in the case of the Spriricom. This is unfortunate because her overall thesis is one that is highly controversial – and this means that every bit of information offered is critical to sustain overall credibility. All it takes is one glaring error for skeptics and debunkers to pounce.

Another minor quibble is that the book is overwritten, wordy and seems repetitive and padded at times –but others might disagree.

Overall, I absolutely recommend this book. I also liked the author's skillful overview of how beliefs about death and the afterlife shifted and evolved from ancient times, through a series of dominating structures which hold sway over society for a few centuries, only to change.

Ken Korczak is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA

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