Michael Schmicker's Blog, page 6

James Bond Meets Salvador Dali (Book Review)

“The name’s Dougherty – Victoria Dougherty.”

And she’s come up with an erudite, neoclassic, Cold War thriller.

“The Bone Church” is set primarily in Nazi-occupied – and subsequently Soviet-occupied – Eastern Europe. The plot revolves around the Infant of Prague, a famous Catholic religious icon pursued for different reasons by the Czech Resistance and Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels. The atmosphere is sour and gritty – ration coupons, coal smoke, greasy goulash. The story repeatedly time-shifts between the 40s and 50s, and the plot is twisty and byzantine – choked with hints and suspicions, scattered clues, double-crosses, tails, moles, and blackmailers. Everybody carries faked documents. Nothing is what it seems.

Multiple writers, particularly British, have chosen this Kafkaesque era and communist Eastern Europe as a setting for a novel. John le Carre set the bar with “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,” named “the best spy novel of all time” by Publishers Weekly in 2006. Graham Greene’s most famous Cold War works take place in Cuba and Vietnam, but he set “The Third Man” in Allied-occupied Vienna. British novelist Ian Fleming dispatched his suave hero James Bond – “The name’s Bond, James Bond” – on missions into Moscow-controlled Austria, East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Dougherty’s Czechoslovakia. If Fleming were still alive, I’m confident he’d invite her over to Dukes Bar to swap notes over a shaken, not stirred, martini. The 007 creator delighted in oddly named characters like Goldfinger and Blofeld; Dougherty created the gypsy Srut, an odd jobber for the Prague Underground. Bond sported a Walther PPK; Dougherty’s hero Felix packs a Walther P38. Bond escapes baddies by using gyroplanes and strap-on jetpacks; Felix and Srut hijack a fire truck, and careen through Prague. Dougherty even delivers a fiery explosion scene rivaling “For Your Eyes Only.”

But “The Bone Church” is closer to John le Carre and Graham Greene than Bond parody.

Like le Carre, Doherty explores the moral grays of the Cold War era, and how the challenged respond. Like Greene, a fellow Catholic (he a convert, she born to the faith), Dougherty serves up a flawed, all-too-human Church of Rome. Protagonist Felix is an honorable Jesuit, his father Marek noble and self-sacrificing. But her secondary cast includes a corporate-ladder-climbing bishop; a nasty nun; a worldly Cardinal chauffeured around in a Mercedes limousine carrying a leather briefcase stuffed with hundred-dollar bills; a fetishized Infant of Prague doll; and a Vatican hierarchy castigated by Srut in the novel – and by a number of authors in real life – for failing to more forcefully confront Hitler and the Holocaust horror during World War II. The debate over Pope Pius XII’s response still rages today, adding a moral gravity to Dougherty’s novel wholly absent in Fleming’s cartoon Bond.

The thread of surrealism woven into “The Bone Church” is proprietary Dougherty. Scenes worthy of Salvador Dali pop up throughout the story. Felix sees visions of Simon the Zealot and St, Bartholomew; confers with his dead mother-in-law; laces on his hockey skates and escapes down a frozen river dodging a hail of gunfire while dragging Srut behind him on a rope. The Goddess of Soliloquy flies off the façade of the National Theater and pokes her head through the fire truck window to give Felix advice while Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” thumps through his head; St. Michael the Archangel, appearing to him in street clothes, counsels him in extremis; the dead Srut steadies his shooting hand; during an extended gunfight inside the Bone Church (which lends the novel its title), a life-size human skeleton of Jesus Christ crashes down on the hero’s head; a tribe of “Indians” sporting bows and arrows and living in teepees on the Czech-West German border help him across no man’s land; a sculptor signs his work on the back of an eyeball – sly homage to Bunuel and Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou”? Probably not, but who knows? Nothing is what it seems.

All I know is that Dougherty has managed to slip into the room with Fleming, Greene and le Carre and deliver a clever, original take on Cold War noir.

Got that? Good.

Meet her at the bookstore at midnight, comrade. She’s got a package for you.

Extremely Strange Adventures (Book Review)

The first and last time I jumped out of an airplane, I was 17 years old.

It was my mom who nearly died of fright. She had to sign a waiver that listed in gruesome detail all the ways her underage, unlucky son could die or sustain serious injury from skydiving. True to the odds, nothing went wrong. After four hours of “training,” the actual skydive, from Geronimo! to hard landing, lasted just a few minutes. My weekend parachute was an adrenaline rush, but hardly death-defying or life changing.

In contrast, the extreme adventurers in Mary Coffey's fascinating book "Explorers of the Infinite" push themselves physically and psychologically to the breaking point. Skydiver Cheryl Sterns jumped from an airplane 352 times in 24 hours, setting a Guinness World Record. Tanya Streeter free dove without oxygen to a depth of 525 feet below the ocean, holding her breath for almost three and a half minutes, her heart rate plummeting to five beats a minute, before resurfacing. Cyclist Jure Robic pedaled for 3,042 miles across the continental U.S. in 8 days, 19 hours and 33 minutes.

Such super-athletes suffer mind-numbing exhaustion, unbearable pain, intense solitude, sudden terror, and narrow escapes from death – conditions which parapsychologists know can generate paranormal experiences. And the heroes of this book have a journal’s worth, experiencing time distortions, altered states of consciousness, telepathic communications, out-of body experiences, precognition, premonitions of death, and visions of the dead.

I’ve investigated and written about these baffling phenomena for some time. So the reading pleasure for me came less from the garden-variety paranormal experiences these crazies report than from the god-awful, insane exploits which trigger them.

Fifty-five year old ultra-marathoner Marshall Ulrich had a classic out-of-body experience running the Badwater, a 135-mile, non-stop foot race across Death Valley in July when daytime temperatures can hit 129 degrees Fahrenheit. He’s done it 13 times, won it four times. Insanely, he once did it four times back and forth, non-stop, for over 77 hours, while pulling a modified baby jogger loaded with 200 pounds of water, ice and spare clothes. In 1993, while trying to break his own record, he suddenly stepped out of his body. From above, he watched himself running along, “like watching myself on a movie screen.” He remained out of body all night, until the next morning when he realized that “dawn was coming, the sun was about to rise. I knew it was time to go back into my body.” (Skydiver Sterns experienced a similar, extended OBE during her non-stop jumping.)

“Many mountaineers have sensed unexplainable presences in the high mountains,” notes Coffey. American climber Lou Whittaker in 1989 was guiding the first American assault on 28,169-foot high Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, the third tallest mountain in the world. At his base camp, he kept sensing the presence of a middle-aged, friendly Tibetan woman spirit who communicated with him mentally, telling him everything would go OK. His wife Ingrid arrived at the base camp shortly after Lou had departed for the summit, but her ascent to 16,000 feet was so fast she suffered severe altitude sickness. She spent three days in agony in Lou’s tent, ministered to by the same Tibetan spirit. “She was wearing a headscarf and a long dress. She was shadowy and two-dimensional, like a silhouette.” The spirit would put her hand on Ingrid’s forehead, very comforting, and help her to roll over. She didn’t speak; the two women communicated telepathically. Two months later, after they had returned to the States, Ingrid finally told Lou about her strange helper. Stunned, he admitted seeing her too. They’re convinced it wasn’t a hallucination, since both sensed the same apparition.

Coffee notes similar “spirit friends” assisted and comforted many well-known adventurers in their perils, including Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton during his desperate 36-hour trek across frigid South Georgia Island; aviator Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh on his record-breaking, non-stop transatlantic flight to Europe in 1927; and mariner Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail solo around the globe.

In 1997, Tony Bullimore was attempting to duplicate Slocum’s feat, competing in the around-the-world Vendee Globe single-handed yacht race. Two months into the race, a fierce storm in the Southern Ocean rolled his boat, trapping him upside down in his watertight cabin for almost five days. Race officials informed his wife Lalel his upturned boat had been spotted in huge seas; he was presumed dead. That night, kneeling by her bed, she received a telepathic message from him. He was alive, he had food and water, but he was exhausted and had to sleep. The following day, he mentally spoke to her again. “Oh Lal, I’m in a mess. It’s wet. The boat won’t stop rolling. I’m cold.” She told him to keep fighting. Back in his watery tomb, shivering and staring into darkness, he suddenly had a vision. He saw an Australian warship steaming for him, a boat was lowered, sailors started banging on the hull, and he watched himself swim to the surface where he was rescued. Twenty-four hours later, everything happened exactly as his vision had foretold.

Coffey presents dozens of such puzzling experiences while pondering their reality and meaning. For an outdoor adventure writer, she demonstrates a surprising familiarity with parapsychological literature, referencing among others Rupert Sheldrake’s ESP research; Montague Ullman’s dream lab investigations; NDE studies by Raymond Moody and Sam Parnia; plus conventional counter-explanations from popular skeptics like Susan Blackmore and Robert Persinger.

Her references are understandably brief and occasionally incorrect – for example, her assertion that scientists know very little about the out-of-body phenomenon. Psychologists, physicians and investigators such as Charles Tart, Stuart Twemlow and D. Scott Rogo mapped the phenomenon several decades ago, and recent NDE research has advanced our understanding. We know a lot about them; it’s just that, like so many other paranormal phenomena, we can’t agree on where they fit in our current model of reality.

But Coffey can be forgiven for not penning a dry parapsychology book few would read. She offers enough science to ground her stories, but wisely focuses on the sense of surprise and wonder her eclectic community of daredevils find in their unexpected brushes with the infinite. As British BASE jumper Shaun Ellison puts it, “There’s so much out there that we don’t understand.”

Freud, Nietzsche and Bertha Pappenheim (Book Review)

Women baffled Freud.

“What does a woman want?” the frustrated founder of psychoanalysis complained towards the end of his thirty years of research into the recesses of the feminine mind.

Freud already knew what women were. They were inferior to men. They “oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own.” They suffered from “penis envy.” Their achievements outside the home were negligible. “It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented – that of plaiting and weaving.” Freud’s contemporary, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, spoke for many 19th century men (and some today) when he declared “Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy.”

In Guises of Desire, Hilda Reilly engagingly illuminates this miasma of misogynist fin-de-siècle attitudes through her deeply researched and richly nuanced portrait of Bertha Pappenheim, an unmarried and suitor-less 21-year-old Jewish woman rebelling against the rigid expectations of her gender, religion, social caste, and family.

“Hysteria,” a handy 19th century catchall diagnosis masking medical ignorance and male chauvinism, was frequently trotted out to explain symptoms often exhibited by unhappy or unconventional women of the era – insomnia, lack of appetite, nervousness, irritability, sexual forwardness, a desire to masturbate, a “tendency to cause trouble” – for which no organic cause could be identified. Bertha manifested many of these, as well as hallucinations, amnesia, neuralgia, limb paralysis, a visual disorder, and a persistent cough.

Reilly skillfully recreates, from the inside out, Bertha’s three year struggle (1880-1882) to survive and overcome her “hysteria,” taking the reader inside her head, into her troubled thoughts and wild imaginings, as she copes with a succession of shocks, temporary improvements, and discouraging setbacks . As Bertha spirals downward, she hallucinates snakes, suspects people are planning to incarcerate her, develops a morphine addiction, and finally attempts suicide by throwing herself from a bedroom window. Reilly weaves into this 19th century soap opera a slew of details and incidents which help us better understand the weltanschauung which shaped Bertha’s conflicted personality – the family’s strictly observed religious rituals; her unsympathetic brother Willi who mocks her desire to attend university (women lack the reasoning power of men) and cruelly quotes Aristotle (women are “deformed males”); her mother’s annoyance at Bertha’s unmarried, semi-liberated cousin Anna, for giving Bertha ideas about “women’s rights and girl’s education.”

Her primary physician, Josef Breuer, does his best to mitigate her “hysteria” using a novel “talking cure” (psychoanalysis) – and eventually claims success on behalf of the new therapeutic technique. Pappenheim is iconic in psychoanalytical literature as the famous “Anna O,” whose litany of physical and mental disorders are described in detail by Freud and Breuer in Studies in Hysteria (1895).

Ironically, some medical historians wonder if Breuer misdiagnosed her – neurological science being in its infancy. Reilly, who holds a Master’s of Science in Consciousness Studies, believes that “many of the Bertha’s symptoms can be accounted for by a form of temporal lobe epilepsy.” Breuer himself seriously entertained the possibility of a neurological disorder.

Whatever caused and cured her myriad of afflictions, Bertha Pappenheim survived her ordeal to become a famous social worker, feminist (Founder of the League of Jewish Women) and writer (novellas, plays. poetry, children’s’ stories). In 1954, Germany posthumously honored her with a postage stamp as a “Benefactor of Mankind.”

Guises of Desire is a multifaceted, masterful recreation of Bertha at her nadir – an intellectually-satisfying medical mystery; a vivid portrait of Jewish life in Vienna a century ago; and a humbling reminder of the au courant cultural biases which inevitably infect the theory and practice of psychology.

Past Life, Anyone?

Past life, anyone?

I recently finished Dr. Jim Tucker’s fascinating book "Return to Life" – an examination of children’s past life memories (or confabulations, if you’re a die-hard skeptic). Next to Dr. Ian Stevenson’s pioneering reincarnation case studies, it’s the best I’ve read on the topic.

It got me thinking.

I’m a member of the Goodreads Historical Fictionistas group. We share a love of historical fiction, and I noticed many gravitate towards books set in a specific era (e.g. medieval, or Renaissance, or 19th century). I posted the following question to them:

If you had a chance to live life in another century, which one would YOU choose to live in, where, why?

I’d live in the late Victorian age.

I’ve read almost all of Dickens’ books, and thrilled to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ve also devoured most of H.G. Wells (The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, etc.). The intellectual, political and technological ferment of that era is so heady – Darwin, Marx, suffragism, steam trains and telegraphs and a flood of mechanical inventions that transformed our world; the looming collapse of a haughty but doomed aristocratic social structure, and the grinding poverty which accompanied industrialization and led to World War I and the birth of the modern era. Its appeal never seems to die. I’m not surprised Steampunk resonates with young people. Life is more colorful, emotional, the highs higher and the lows lower, than today’s more boring, homogenized, global consumer society.

My life in that era?

I’m a man, of course (a woman’s life would be too confining), and I’m not too poor; maybe a minor member of Parliament, with a flat in Mayfair, a country house in Kent and membership in the Arts Club where I dine with my friends Dickens and Kipling as they discuss the British Raj in India and how to handle a pushy, upstart America; debate poor house laws and women’s emancipation; wonder over Rontgen’s discovery of x-rays; and shake their heads at the French Impressionists. Hard for me to imagine a more interesting historical time and place to live in!

And you? When and where would you live?

Terry and the Volcano (Book Review)

At 6 A.M. on August 22, 1968, Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano erupted with a roar.

A “huhu” (angry) Madame Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes, launched thundering fountains of flaming rock 150 feet into the Pacific sky. When Hawaiian Volcano Observatory scientists cautiously peered over the rim of Hiiaka crater at 7 A.M., they discovered a fiery lake of lava 60-feet deep had filled the crater floor. Half of Honolulu rushed to the Big Island to see the pyrotechnics – a popular pastime for those of us here in the Islands.

Back on the Mainland, Carl Biemiller read the papers and recognized the seed of a good story. A veteran writer/magazine editor, and author of adventure books for young readers, he wove the volcano eruption into an unpublished manuscript which his son Eric later discovered and combined with a second into this delightful, little gem of Hawaiiana.

Uncle George storms into the New Jersey home of his nephew Terry, a 12-year old boy suffering from rheumatic fever, and whisks him away to Hawaii where the sun, sea, and laid-back Island-lifestyle help him recover his health. By book’s end, with the clever use of a kite he learns to fly, Terry saves the lives of Bobby, Buster and Maka during a volcano eruption. “The Kite of Kilauea” exudes a Fifties flavor. Optimism, pluck and hard work save the day, Hawaii’s chop suey of races mixes cheerfully, and the Hawaiian sovereignty movement hasn’t shown up yet to force us to ponder the morality of colonization and annexation in this somewhat idealized description of life in Paradise. We’re all in a darker place today.

But the resurrected, rebuilt manuscript holds up remarkably well. Humor, fast-paced writing, a cast of colorful locals (still recognizable in Hawaii), and a remarkable wealth of Hawaiian history, sports, culture, botany, theology and language – seamlessly slipped into the story – keep this book both relevant and fun for readers of any age. Using Terry’s dreams, Biemiller artfully delivers a primer of Hawaiian history prior to the 1778 arrival of Capt. Cook, and even tucks in the back of the book a bonus glossary of 60 common Hawaiian words – so you’re also scoring a free Berlitz, all for only $3.98.

If you’re a “haole” intent on visiting “Hawaii nei” by plane or armchair, get off your “okole” “wiki wiki” and buy this book. You’re “lolo” if you pass up this bargain.

A Genuine Table Levitation?

In “Alessandra Queen of Spirits,” my upcoming novel, the heroine levitates a table during a séance.

Fantasy?

Perhaps not.

I uncovered credible scientific evidence for this baffling phenomenon while researching my first book, “Best Evidence.” Italian Spiritualist medium Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918), whose amazing, real-life story inspired my new novel, repeatedly performed unexplainable levitations of tables and movements of furniture and objects under tightly controlled scientific conditions.

The curious and the skeptical can examine for themselves the available scientific evidence (check out my bookshelf “paranormal-Eusapia Palladino”).

Veteran parapsychological researcher Prof. Stephen Braude of the University of Maryland has written extensively on the topic of psychokinesis (abbreviated PK). His ground-breaking book, “The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science,” is considered a classic.

Under the "Videos" link found on this page, I've posted an interesting one I came across today on YouTube. Over ten days, Professor Braude and U.S. film-maker Robert Narholz visited the Felix Circle (Felix Experimental Group) and observed medium K.M. during a classic “cabinet séance.” Braude writes about the levitation shown in the video: “...we had five, clear, table levitations, three of which occurred in red light sufficient to see hands on the table and legs beneath (on the floor). In the latter, we were able to record a brief levitation with infrared video. Although it can't be regarded as strictly evidential (because not all sitters or hands were visible from the single camera angle), I consider it a valuable document of an event I'm convinced was authentic.”

What do YOU think?

Assuming it’s real, who or what levitated the table?

Alessandra believes spirits of the dead help her perform her levitations. Parapsychologists believe PK is a natural but poorly understood power of the human mind.

Pauline's Slave

Some books can be wolfed down like lunch at the office desk, quick bites between phone calls. Pauline Montagna’s finely-plotted, ambitious (400-plus pages) novel “The Slave” is best consumed unhurried, with a glass of Chianti at your elbow, like a traditional Italian Sunday dinner.

The author sets her table with familiar food – forbidden love between a Juliet and her Romeo – and the plot (with several unexpected revelations and some intriguing-subplots) unfolds without an eye on the clock, mirroring life in both medieval and modern Italy. As the unhappy heroine Aurelia and the wary, horse-whisperer slave Batu cautiously explore their feelings towards each other, the reader has time to notice and appreciate the investment Montagna made in her historical research – a persistent, zesty seasoning of “buongiornos” and “figlia mias”; curiosities like the farrier (a man who trims horses hooves) and the saltarello (a 15th century court dance with a curious hop step); a game of morra (similar to modern Rock, Paper, Scissors played in the 14th century Italy, and still popular in the 21st) and the venerable horse race in the piazza (a savory I particularly enjoyed – an Italian in-law of mine once competed in the famous Palio di Siena). The author is particularly strong here (she earned her BA in Italian, French and History). In due time, like involtini following the pasta, Montagna serves up the main dish – Lorenzo, the ne’er-do-well scion of the powerful Graziano family, Aurelia’s arranged-marriage partner, Batu’s rival. The dutiful daughter reluctantly obeys her father, and we dine well for the next forty chapters on the enmities between the mismatched couple and the roller-coaster fortunes of their respective families until we finally push away from the table satisfied. True, a judicious bit of trimming by the author, shortening the repast and serving up the denouement sooner, wouldn’t have spoiled the meal, but if tales set in Italy “ti piace,” (please you), and you aren’t in a hurry, you’ll enjoy this one.

A Pen to Kill For

Got an empty evening? I found you a companion.

I just finished Suzanne Tyrpak’s unsettling "Ghost Plane and Other Disturbing Tales." It sucks sustenance from the same throbbing vein of amorphous, human dread opened by Stephen King and Rod Serling. Taut, spare writing packed into 64 pages – each edgy tale a tightly wound spring that releases suddenly, leaving a small scar on your psyche.

“Disturbing” is an apt subtitle. How about a pissed go-go dancer in Jersey, high on Black Beauties and Harvey Wallbangers, who fillets a creepy customer with a kitchen knife? A solitary, graveyard-shift airport drudge with a bucket of paper towels and Lysol who boards the wrong plane. An older employee humiliated by a new boss, musing how easy it is to arrange an accident for the harpie. A homicidal woman in a meditation class – "om mani padme hum" – futilely attempting to drive a him from her thoughts. You get the idea.

Jeroen ten Berge’s creepy cover is a bonus.

Keep Goodreads a Free Speech Zone

Just came across an interesting discussion going on within the Historical Fictionistas group I haunt. The debate deals with allegations of Goodreads censorship.

In brief, some reviewers have reportedly been threatened by authors upset by a harsh review, or a public accusation (fair or unfair) of spamming or ratings/review manipulations.

Six months ago, owner Amazon responded by issuing new Terms of Service regarding reviews, sparking 230 posts. The string is worth reading, pondering. What think ye?

My two cents? A paste of my post follows:

Aloha all!

I'm coming to this discussion six months late, since I just joined Goodreads a week ago.

But first, full disclosure and a little background before I offer up my humble opinion. I'm a published author -- one book agented by a New York pro (Nat Sobel of Sobel-Weber Agency) which was sold to a powerful, Big Five, mainstream conglomerate publisher (St.Martin's Press/Random House); a second book put out by a small independent press (Watermark Publishing in Hawaii); and several self-published (iUniverse; Create Space; Kindle Direct).

I’m not Everyman author, but my experience may help Goodreads reviewers better understand what makes an author (hopefully very few) act irrationally to criticism. Here goes:

I've worked at my trade for over 30 years, first as a newspaper journalist, then a magazine writer, then magazine editor, then finally book author. In the traditional, social pecking order of our craft, the book author is king. When you finish one, you feel you’ve arrived.

It’s daunting and difficult to write anything thirty chapters long, though non-fiction more easily structures itself. Journalists routinely turn feature articles into good books, like my friend Neil Weinberg when he worked at Forbes (Look up “Stolen Without a Gun”). Fiction is the true crown jewel of our craft, the best earning cocktails and canapés, an intellectual soiree, maybe even a mention in the New York Times.

There’s a reason for this respect. A novel is a nightmare for the amateur, and a challenge for a pro. It requires playing with a Rubik’s cube of characters, plot, subplots, pacing, dialogue, style, emotional arc – pieces which must be moved into place in sequence and at the precise moment, to propel the tale forward, hold the fickle reader’s attention, and arrive at a successful denouement. Historical fiction – the novels we devour and discuss in this Goodreads group – raises the complexity another level. How much factual history should be inserted? When? Where? (To paraphrase Willie Nelson, "Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be writers.")

Any fiction, even bad fiction, is exhausting to write. The craft is difficult, lonely, and decidedly anti-social – just ask my wife or my son. George Orwell captured it perfectly. "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

And then you face Judgment Day. The high from selling a 70,000 word novel approaches rapture, but few get called; the low from receiving your 25th query rejection, or a blistering Goodreads review, can be soul-scarring. So there’s a reason some authors badly mishandle a negative review.

That said, nobody owes an author anything.

If all our “blood, toil, tears and sweat” (thank you Winston) produces a mess, or a ho-hum, and someone calls us on it, we need to swallow hard and start rewriting – or prove the reviewer wrong by finding other readers who believe we’re the next Philippa Gregory or Bernard Cornwell.

Censorship is simply a bad idea.

Short of legally actionable libel (extremely rare), Goodreads management should stay out – don’t sweep away “avoid author” shelves, don’t remove reviews alleging author spamming or manipulation of ratings/reviews. Let reviewers skewer or gush to their hearts content.

Group Moderators are the only police we need. They know the beat, the neighborhood “characters,” and can better mediate between an aggrieved author and a rogue reviewer when some isolated incident of egregious falsehood or unwarranted ad hominem attack occurs.

Jeff Bezos should enthusiastically embrace the free speech banner at Goodreads. He’s the bloody owner of the iconic Washington Post, for heaven’s sake (search Goodreads for “All the President’s Men” if you’re too young to remember Watergate).

But it’s also good business. As Forbes magazine contributor David Vinjamuri noted around the time Amazon swallowed up Goodreads (3/29/13), “Amazon has been wrestling with review fraud in the past year. Because book reviews on Goodreads are identifiable (tied to a social profile), they are harder to manipulate. This may add a new and more credible review source to Amazon’s internal reviews. The average book review score is lower on Goodreads, and the variability is wider, making Goodreads reviews more useful to readers. “

And to serious writers.

Keep Goodreads a free speech zone.

Who Was the Real "Alessandra Queen of Spirits"?

My new novel, "Alessandra Queen of Spirits" was inspired by a real life person.

While researching my first book, "Best Evidence," I came across a fascinating woman – Italian Spiritualist medium Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918), a fiery-tempered, erotic, middle-aged Neapolitan peasant woman who levitated tables and conjured up spirits of the dead in dimly-lit séance rooms all across Europe at the end of the 19th century. Her psychic powers baffled Nobel Prize-winning scientists, captivated aristocracy from Paris to Vienna and enraged the powerful Catholic Church which suspected her paranormal feats were the work of Satan. Her scandalous flirtations, her meteoric rise to fame, her humiliating fall and miraculous redemption made world headlines at the time (when she died, she earned an obituary in the New York Times).

My heroine, like Palladino, is a Spiritualist medium, which adds a hook to the novel, but the story itself is firmly grounded in the bitter, fin-de-siecle clash between Darwinism/Science and religion/Spiritualism. Most 19th century mediums were women, suffering from "female hysteria," according to the (male) psychiatrists of the Victorian era. I thoroughly enjoyed researching the social, political, sexual and psychological currents of the era.

If you want to see some of the books I read to help me craft the novel, check out the book list tagged "paranormal-Eusapia Palladino." From cholera epidemics and Spiritualism to Camorra gangsters and Victorian dinners in Cambridge England, you have to deliver accurate details. I even poured through antique Baedeker Guides from the 19th century to find out how much a plate of macaroni cost.