New at the Library

Reviewed: LR May 2022 p. 39.
Description: On the morning of October 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher in suburban London, awoke choking and gasping, convinced disaster was about to strike. An hour later, a mountain of rubble containing waste from a coal mine collapsed above the village of Aberfan, swamping buildings and killing 144 people, many of them children. Among the doctors and emergency workers who arrived on the scene was John Barker, a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital, in Shrewsbury. At Aberfan, Barker became convinced there had been supernatural warning signs of the disaster, and decided to establish a “premonitions bureau,” in conjunction with the Evening Standard newspaper, to collect dreams and forebodings from the public, in the hope of preventing future calamities. Middleton was one of hundreds of seemingly normal people, who would contribute their visions to Barker’s research in the years to come, some of them unnervingly accurate. As Barker’s work plunged him deeper into the occult, his reputation suffered. But in the face of professional humiliation, Barker only became more determined, ultimately realizing with terrible certainty that catastrophe had been prophesied in his own life. In Sam Knight’s crystalline telling, this story comes to encompass the secrets of the world. We all know premonitions are impossible–and yet they come true all the time. Our lives are full of collisions and coincidence: the question is how we perceive these implausible events and therefore make meaning in our lives. (publ.)

Reviewed: LRB 20 May 2021 p. 31.

Description: Humans are pattern-matching creatures, and astrology is our grandest pattern-matching game. In this work of history and analysis, data scientist Alexander Boxer examines classical texts on astrology to expose its underlying scientific and mathematical framework. Astrology, he argues, was the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained by some of history’s most brilliant minds from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler. A “scheme of heaven,” or horoscope, is recognized as pseudoscience today, but was once considered a cutting-edge scientific tool. Not only does Boxer trace different applications of horoscopes back to their origins, he also puts them to the test using modern data sets and statistical science, arguing that today’s data scientists do work similar to astrologers of yore. At once critical, rigorous, and far-ranging, A Scheme of Heaven recontextualizes astrology as a vast, technological project-spanning continents and centuries-that foreshadowed our data-driven world today. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 5 June 2017 p. 46
Contents: Science and the paranormal -- The believing brain -- Area 51: what is really going on in there? -- The Roswell incident: what really happened? -- Close encounters of the second kind: physical evidence of alien contact -- Close encounters of the third kind: direct encounters with aliens -- Close encounters of the fourth kind: alien abduction -- The mythos of ancient aliens -- Praying to aliens -- Ancient myths and modern media -- Cloud's illusions -- Are they out there? -- Why do people believe in UFOs and aliens? -- The verdict.

Description: The witch came to prominence--and often a painful death--in early modern Europe, yet her origins are much more geographically diverse and historically deep. In this landmark book, Ronald Hutton traces witchcraft from the ancient world to the early-modern stake. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 18 Nov. 2016 p. 30

Reviewed: NYT/BR 30 October 2016 p. 13