Sam KnightBesprekingen

A gem of a book.
The author hooks you in with the crazy but true story of a premonitions bureau, a place that collects premonitions and then watches to see if any come true.
He then proceeds to basically do a biography of a psychiatrist who came up with the idea. The psychiatrist also dabbled in aversion therapy and the idea of whether or not it is possible to be scared to death.
Meanwhile, the do tor’s partner in this somewhat kooky endeavor is a reporter who is one of the leading writers on NASA and the space race.
A bizarre but charming combination

Interesting thesis and idea and amazing research… but the writing is… not good.

Interesting concepts and characters a fascinating subject, plus very good writing - but something here just doesn't work. The title is misleading; this is not really a story about the Premonitions Bureau but instead a look at so many things, very few of which really consider the legitimacy of premonitions.

In the late 1960s, British psychiatrist John Barker became fascinated by premonitions, and, with Peter Fairley, started a Premonitions Bureau - a sort of clearinghouse for prophecies and premonitions from around the country. He wondered if disasters - like the Aberfan coal tip, plane crashes, fires, train derailments - could be avoided with this early warning system. Over a few years, only about three percent of the predictions were accurate, and even then, they were not specific enough to avert any catastrophe, and could only be matched up after the fact. Sam Knight digs into the history of Barker and the hospital where he worked (Shelton, in Shrewsbury), the premonitions bureau and some of its best "percipients," various theories of time, and Barker's own early demise.

Unusual, interesting.

Quotes

It can be very difficult, even in the moment that something noticeable is happening, to separate an event from the meaning that we choose to give it. With time, once an unlikely occurrence is incorporated into the story of a life, or a death, it becomes almost impossible to see the alternative possibilities that once existed. (56)

Premonitions are impossible, and they come true all the time. (71)

When we stop seeing where things are going, we cease to be ourselves. It is human to think ahead. (76)

The difference between science and madness is correcting your explanation when it doesn't map on to the world. (102)

...Barker...gave credence and attention to men and women whose illusions had not been previously taken seriously. (134)

We see the world as our community sees it. We are drawn into each other's scheme of things. (143)

There was no vision without a disaster to see. (149)

The free energy principle drives our memories, intuition and expectations to generate the smoothest experience of reality as it hits us....seeing things before they happen is how we, as mortal souls, can seek to slow down time. (154)

Part of tragedy is the certainty by which it proceeds and how we interrogate our choices as it does so. (223)

Like Barker, [George] Engel wanted to expand the frontiers of psychiatry and to pay more attention to the physiological impact of our emotions. (234)

"Nocebo effect"

...A warning doesn't bring it about. The future is already there. (236)

Oh mann!

The foreword was SOO hilarious, I expected more from this book. There are several stories that are decent enough, Unfortunately the foreword is almost, no IS the best...

It seems like with every major disaster, there are people who claim to have had a premonition that something was going to happen. I enjoyed this historical account of a psychiatrist who joined forces with a journalist in a project to collect people's premonitions in order to see how many come true. The author does a good job discussing coincidence and other factors that can create a false impression that an actual premonition has come true. However, there are enough anecdotes about truly uncanny perceptions as to make one wonder.

The Premonitions Bureau (Faber), Journalist Sam Knight’s first book is an interesting portrayal of this real collaboration with the Evening Standard that was set up in the 60s by Cambridge psychologist John Barker to investigate cases where people had ‘seen’ calamitous events before they happened. They asked members of the public who had experienced a premonition to contact them to log it, and then checked the news to see if there was a subsequent, corresponding incident. The ultimate hope was that perhaps some action might be able to be taken in a way that might prevent such an event happening as a result. Which then begged the question that if the event didn’t happen then would there be a premonition anticipating it? What was certain was that, among the hundreds of reports that they received, there was a surprising number of people who described incidents in some detail in advance and that there were a few individuals who appeared to act as some kind of lightning rod for such paranormal insights. Aberfan, plane and train crashes are all examples where two people, in particular, were able to give details of roughly where and how many casualties. It’s told in a lovely, narrative way and the characters who run the organisation, as well as the seers themselves, are so interesting. It may not be scientific enough for some but I found it fascinating.½

I’m not sure why or how this book got so many good reviews in the press. For a start it’s a biography of John Barker, a fascinating man and psychiatrist with many interests, the premonition bureau being just one. The title is misleading and I strongly suspect it’s because the publishers advised that “premonitions bureau” would sell more books than “A Biography of John Barker.” The author is constantly going off at a tangent and it is difficult to see the relevance to the main text. (For example the discussion of placebo v nocebo). Most disappointing is the lack of any rigour in discussing the value and believability of the premonitions. No scientific or quasi-scientific analysis is given. In the end I was left with a biography of a flawed man and a bunch of almost random anecdotes that any good science writer could drive the proverbial coach and horses through.

Vivian Caethe’s “The Feast of Hungry Ghosts” features Pinkerton agent Beatrice Jones dispatched to Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885. (Yes, Rock Springs is a real place, but I have no idea how much of the background is based in history.) Like a lot of Pinkerton work, there’s labor problems involved. To bust a strike of railroad workers, Chinese laborers are brought in, and the workers kill them. That’s where the hungry ghosts come in. The story is a bit predictable in stereotypes. Displaced union members, evidently, get no sympathy when replaced by foreign scabs. And Jones is helped by a local Taoist priestess. The story is a bit too long though Caethe does some interesting things with the ghosts at the end.

“Brown and the Lost Dutchman Mine” from J. A. Campbell is, of course, another adventure with ghost hunter Elliott and his dog Brown. Here Brown gets to have conversations with a local lizard. Like most of the stories I’ve read in this series, I didn’t hate it, but I’m also not a fan.

Sam Knight’s “Uncle Benjamin’s Triple ‘T’ Tonic” is a dark, Bradburyesque story. Protagonist George is a bullied and put upon scrawny boy of ten. His mother, a prostitute, died, and another prostitute adopted him. Traveling patent medicine salesman Uncle Benjamin and his sidekick Charles Whitcomb, supposedly an ex-slave, offer a tonic that will give you what you most want – if you pay all you can afford. He even offers a guarantee and says he’s not leaving town until the customers are satisfied. George knows what he wants, but Uncle Benjamin won’t sell. And then the man that killed George’s mother returns to town …

Jason Andrew’s “A Dream of a Country Cottage” is a traditional ghost story that kind of breaks the rules of the weird western in its setting: post-WWI Baton Rouge. Its hero is another Pinkerton agent. He works for its paranormal unit, the Omega Watch. Agent Heller investigates a possible haunting hampering the renovation of a plantation house.

It’s the old-gunfighter-whose-tired-of-killing story in Kenneth W. Cain’s well-done, if a trifle too long, “Hired Hand”. Trouble is, there’s a whole lot of zombie-like people, infected by a fungus, that need killing.

Kit Volker’s “Another One” is part of the same series as her “Smoke People”. Its hero, a black lawman, drags people into Judge Parker’s court in Oklahoma Territory. This is an entertaining and mildly humorous story about said lawman running into enough vampires that he packs two guns – one loaded with lead bullets and one loaded with silver bullets. I thought the ending was too obscure. Or maybe I just missed the joke.

As for the three memorable stories, there’s Dakota Brown’s “The Life” which plays with reader expectations in a story about a female vampire passing as a cowboy. Things mostly work out until she runs across a Mexican vampire.

David Boop’s “The Tale of Uji the Griot” throws a bunch of stuff together in a pleasing mix of humor and action. Uji is a traveling entertainer from Africa who gets involved with the widow of future Indian chief and protecting her and her son from another band of Indians who happen to be shapeshifters. There was a bit too much on the power of song and story.

Most memorable was another Lone Crow story, “Blood for the Jaguar”, from Joel Jenkins. This one takes right after his “Old Mother Hennessy”. Bounty hunters Six-Gun Susannah Johnson and Lone Crow are on the trail of one Spider Crawford. Along the way, they encounter a mysterious temple, and we learn about Susannah’s unrequited love for Lone Crow and her relationship to Crawford.

Nothing bad here even if most of the stories aren’t particularly memorable. Still, if you’re looking for a collection of weird westerns, it’s worth a look.