consciousness carries them along. She explains her functional blindness simply and matter-of-factly because, as a good Scot, speaking of dramatic personal matters is not acceptable. A masterful wordmonger, McWilliam consistently delivers the perfect word or phrase to express each thought. When she lost her sight, she was forced to adapt to audio books, but she never lost her love of the physical book. In addition to the loveliness of the prose, the author’s life story is just good reading: her childhood in Edinburgh, happy days spent on the Scottish Isle of Colonsay, the years she ignored her writing talents and how she dealt with her blindness. She drops names in the British way of assuming readers know exactly whom she is talking about, and she includes so many of England’s greats, who stimulated, encouraged and prodded her along the way. There is a slight hiccup in the middle of the book as McWilliam descends into cathartic confession, but it’s easily skimmed through and worth the wade. Her alcoholism and guilt are nothing new, but readers will cherish the author’s infectious bibliophilic delight. “I want to attest to the goodness of life and I want to share something,” she writes in closing. “If it isn’t a life—well, then, let it be a sentence.” Anyone who enjoys a play of words and appreciates the turn of a phrase in a beautifully constructed sentence will value this book for years to come.
PARANORMAL My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife
Moody, Raymond and Perry, Paul HarperOne (256 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 7, 2012 978-0-06-204642-0 A lucid, engrossing memoir from a psychologist and philosopher dedicated to the afterlife. If Moody’s (The Last Laugh, 1999, etc.) career capstone arrived with the lionizing 1975 publication of his landmark report Life after Life, his memoir, co-authored by Perry (coauthor: Evidence of the Afterlife, 2010, etc.), an acclaimed author on the subject, affords his life’s work even more dramatic heft. Moody’s passion for the spiritual world can be traced to an early childhood in World War II–era Georgia raised by an abusively crass father and a depressed mother. He recalls at age 4 establishing theories about death and concepts of postmortem “soul survival.” Moody writes ardently of an interest in astronomy throughout adolescence, undeterred by a skeptical father and crippling myxedema, a thyroid deficiency. As a philosophy scholar, he became “hooked on death” and intensely explored spiritual phenomena, out-of-body sensations, near-death events and theories of mind-body coexistence. Plumbing an interest in “facilitated visions” via hypnotic past-life regression therapy, Moody details his nine former lives, including that of a threadbare wooly mammoth hunter, a drowning boat builder and a murdered female Chinese artist. He coined the term “near-death experience” as his first book soared in popularity; on the lecture circuit, he befriended fellow afterlife pioneer 2306
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Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Then his illness resurfaced, causing a suicide attempt and a stint at a psychiatric facility after his experimentations with spirit communication and crystallomancy were discovered by his closed-minded father. Now in his mid-60s, Moody continues his revolutionary research. The supernatural undertones saturating the narrative are dwarfed by an overwhelming sense that this eccentric visionary just might be on to something. The fascinating life story of an impassioned mystical maverick.
HITLERLAND American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power Nagorski, Andrew Simon & Schuster (400 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 13, 2012 978-1-4391-9100-2
A contextually rich look at the buildup of Nazi power, revealing the feebleness of Americans’ assessment of the future danger. In these seemingly casual impressions recorded in newspapers, letters, magazines, diaries and diplomatic reports, many Americans rooted in interwar Germany failed to see the menace in the increasingly inflammatory Nazi rhetoric, as Nagorski (The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow that Changed the Course of World War II, 2007, etc.) depicts in this well-marshaled study. Or if they did—e.g., Chicago Daily News correspondent Edgar Mowrer or Foreign Affairs editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who interviewed Hitler on Apr. 27, 1933, and recorded, “So completely has the Republic been wiped out”—they were not believed. On one hand, most well-clad Western observers were approving of the German sense of method and order; on the other, the Americans were appalled by the enormous discrepancy in wealth between rich and poor and the Weimar Republic’s reputation for sexual licentiousness, especially homosexuality. Nagorski looks at the first wave of fawning observers, if not admirers, of the brash young agitator who engineered the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, including U.S. Envoy Alanson B. Houghton, an industrialist who threw grand parties and blamed America for Germany’s economic woes, and Karl Henry von Wiegland, reporter for Hearst, who described Hitler as a “man of the people.” Some of the more shameless hangers-on included Ernst Hanfstaengl, a halfAmerican, Harvard-educated aristocrat who became enamored of Hitler and served as his publicist; Charles Lindbergh, who shared aircraft secrets and a ringside box at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; and young Martha Dodd, good-time daughter of the American ambassador in Berlin. Few spoke out against Hitler’s virulently anti-Semitic message, and many sheepishly covered over their early lapses in later memoirs. An engrossing study of the times made more fascinating and incredible in retrospect. (8-page black-and-white insert)
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