Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/21

I thought this week was going to be a mulligan, but then a package was on my doorstep Saturday when I got back late from various family frivolities. So here's the one book that was in that package, proof that America's hard-working publicists were still very active up to just a few days before Christmas. (I don't expect anything to show up in my mail next week, but I'd be very happy to be wrong.)

As usual, I haven't read this book -- as I write this, it showed up at the house barely twelve hours ago -- but I'll tell you what I can about it anyway.

The Haunting of Twenty-First-Century America is the third in the supposedly-nonfiction series -- after the original Haunting of America and a volume on Twentieth-Century America. Authors Joel Martin and William J. Birnes here explain how various paranormal events -- from the chapter titles, those include Uri Geller, MK-ULTRA, the the US Army's various researches into remote viewing, and various aspects of the "New Age" -- actually controlled world history in ways that have been completely covered up by the traditional media channels. The book also seems to be in large part an attack on skepticism -- naturally, since those are the people that have proven time and again that these "paranormal events" only actually happen when nobody is paying attention or controlling for cheating. It's a Forge trade paperback, coming December 17th, and I sincerely hope it is not as deliberately misleading and false as I fear it is.