By Jim SchnabelOur Price: $25.95 Our Item Code: round Postage Code: book2
295 Pages, Cover Size: 6" x 9.5" inches |
| Our Review | Opinion of the webmaster, subject to debate |
"Poltergeists, Pranksters and the Secret History of the Cropwatchers." This is the kind of delicious expose we adore: It is not about crop circles themselves but about the personalities and human conflicts that surround them. It is a history of the investigation of crop circles in England starting in the early 1980s. What started with collaboration and a sense of adventure soon degenerated into the kind dissention and senseless backstabbing the UFO field is known for. Researchers divided themselves into camps, each supporting a different theory to explain the circles. The conflicts became personal, and researchers were soon contacting their solicitors to charge each other with libel. (Thank goodness libel law is more liberal in the U.S.!) All the well-known players are profiled with lots of personal and historical details (which we have used to help build our on-line database). The book ends with the story of "Doug and Dave," who claim to have hoaxed at least the best known of the circles -- a strong implication by the author that that the whole phenomenon is an illusion. Crop circle proponents certainly don't like this book, but as a literary work it is wonderfully ironic. Unless you are a "true believer," you won't be able to put it down. -- Glenn Campbell
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| Information from the Publisher | Always supportive |
North America has been particularly hard hit, with at least several dozen formations each summer since 1990, from New York and Massachusetts to California and Washington, and from Vancouver to Ontario. North American enthusiasts are now in the forefront of circles research - or "cerealogy" as it has come to be known - and every summer spend tens of thousands of dollars and many hours in scientific and spiritual evaluation of circles here and abroad.
One day in the summer of 1991, science writer Jim Schnabel ventured to Wiltshire in search of the circles and an answer to their annual mystery. He soon became entranced, not merely by the odd swirled shapes in the fields, but by the human beings who flocked to them: plasma physicists and ritual magicians, dowsers and UFOlogists, New Age tourists and garrulous mediums, and the devoted "cereal" artists whose work lay behind it all - or almost all. Round in Circles, the product of Schnabel's journey through the crop-circle world, is a uniquely intimate and entertaining history of this peculiar phenomenon and the people who surround it.
JIM SCHNABEL is an American science writer based in England. He has contributed to a number of publications including the Washington Post, Science, the Observer, New Scientist, and the Economist. He is also the author of Dark White: Aliens, Abductions and the UFO Obsession, published by Hamish Hamilton, London.
--The Observer
"The funniest book I've read in ages."--The Daily Mail
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