The Paranormal: A Guide to the Unexplained

Anthony North.
London: Blandford, 1996. 250pp. Hardcover.
Reviewed by Taner Edis

A waste of time. North's book is not even good as a sampler of typical paranormal beliefs, since he selects from occult claims to fit a half-baked theory about racial memories. He starts the book by declaring himself neither a skeptic nor a believer (in other words, a believer), performs the usual ritual denunciation of the closed-mindedness of science, and is singing the praises of a universal "creative, higher mind" at the end.

North's "evidence" is typical: reams of anecdotes, mysteries fashioned out of thin air, farfetched hypotheses listed as if they were on a par with any other scientific ideas. Even when he shows some awareness of skeptical explanations of his alleged phenomena, North comes up with ways to save the day for the occult. If cryptomnesia is behind certain memories rather than reincarnation, this still is supposedly "to answer a mystery by a mystery." The next step, naturally, is to bring on quasi-Jungian ideas about "inherited memory." Readers of Susan Blackmore will discover that her discarded hypothesis of a common psychic memory-bank still appeals to some.

A skeptic going through The Paranormal will find numerous errors, not to mention an insistently wrongheaded approach to even the real mysteries touched on by North. However, criticizing popular paranormalist literature this way is somewhat futile. North is looking to read humanly significant meaning off of the universe; the fact that he tries to do this by talking nonsense about things like quantum fields is incidental. Books like these are the inspirational literature of occult religion, not just fringe-science.