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| Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural | 
 enlarge | Author: Jim Steinmeyer
Publisher: Tarcher
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95 (58.73 RON)
Buy New: $16.47 (38.77 RON)
You Save: $8.48 (19.96 RON) (34%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 319308
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 1585426407
Dewey Decimal Number: 001.9092
EAN: 9781585426409
ASIN: 1585426407
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 6 | | NEXT » |
 A Little Off-Topic for Steinmeyer November 4, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I usually love Jim Steinmeyer's writing when he's talking magic or the history of magicians. But alas, I found this to be disappointing. Fort's rambling writings are uncomfortable -- and boring -- to read, and one thinks that those who found him fascinating in his time were pseudo-intellectuals who thought that anything that couldn't be comprehended must be genius.
Steinmeyer does the best he can with this rather arcane gentleman, but even Jim's excellent prose can't make a silk purse out of the enigmatic -- and disturbingly eccentric -- Charles Fort.
 Do Not Judge a Book by Its Cover!!! August 28, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Yes, the old adage about not judging a book by its cover applies here. Sad, but true, the cover of this book as designed by one Jason Smith is BRILLIANT. It is evocative, mysterious, profound, eye and mind catching.....everything which the actual book by Jim Steinmeyer is NOT. Mr. Steinmeyer - so the dust-jacket bio-brief informs - designs magic illusions for TV, film, David Copperfield, etc. Too bad he could not have waved a wand over his book on Charles Fort and made it....magical!
One fault is that probably more than half the book consists of quotations from Fort's books, letters to and from friend and fellow writer Theodore Dreiser and other sources. Another fault is a certain inbalance: the book begins leisurely and lengthily goes into Fort's boyhood and young manhood...but there is really no insight as to when the struggling writer entered the Twilight Zone and got weird. And once in the Zone and reporting via his curious tomes about the goings-on therein, there is no considerate attempt by Steinmeyer to come to grips with any of the phenomena described by way of theoretical explanation. Beautifully embossed on the book's hardcover is a frog falling from the sky - one of Fort's motifs. Yet there is no true attempt at explaining such a mystifying event. I realize that this is a biography of Charles Fort and not an investigation into the strange happenings he built his career on - but, come on....would a bit of investigative explanation have hurt? Even if in appendixes or footnotes?
The book's jacket boasts that "Steinmeyer tells the story of an era in which the certainties of religion and science were being turned on their heads." He does? Einstein and the Scopes trial are mentioned in a weak and wobbly way. He mentions Al Capone a few times - utterly gratuitously, probably to fill up some space - but no real effort is given to encompassing the science and religion of the era. As to the book's subtitle - "The Man Who Invented the Supernatural" - it is totally untrue and misleading and ignores at the very least the fully documented supernatural investigations of several organizations and individuals in the prior century and in the years leading up to Fort's writings. For example: rather contemporaneously with Fort, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was showing Willis O'Brien's film of "The Lost World" to respected scientists who thought they were seeing actual footage of living dinosaurs - and the great creator of Sherlock Holmes was also chasing faked fairies in highly contested photographs of the day.
Anyway - I learned more about Charles Fort and also the phenomena he wrote about by googling him and reading all the rich info for free on Wikipedia. I found their take on Fort and Fortean phenomena to be much more informative that the whole of this book. So - great cover, not-great book.
 An Engaging Portrait of a Difficult Figure July 1, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
If you have a taste for giant lights in the sky or in the ocean, flying ships "shaped like a Mexican cigar", or secret polar civilizations; or especially, if you want to know more about how rain could come down colored red, black, or yellow, or could include a storm of eels or pebbles or frogs, then Charles Fort is your man. And if you want explanations, you might find it satisfactory that Fort instructs about the blood that dripped from the sky, "... our whole solar system is a living thing: that showers of blood upon this earth are its internal hemorrhages. - Or vast living things in the sky, as there are vast living things in the oceans..." Fort gets high points for curiosity, and no points for explication, but ninety years after his strange ideas were first put in print, his name is still known by students of the paranormal, whether the name be reviled or praised. In _Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural_ (Tarcher / Penguin), Jim Steinmeyer has given a jolly story of this remarkably strange man. Steinmeyer has written about various aspects of the history of magic, and he designs magic illusions for famous magicians, but this is an appreciative, no-nonsense biography, quite anomalously fitting for a subject who surrounded himself with at least some nonsensical tales taken as fact.
Fort was born in 1874, and grew up in Albany, N.Y. His father was a grocer, a dandy, and a bully, and following a terrible row at home when he was eighteen, Fort left home for good to see the world. When he returned, he started writing stories for magazines, often in the popular vein of O. Henry. He had some success, got some stories published, but the pay was small. He was saved artistically by none other than the author of _An American Tragedy_, Theodore Dreiser, who became his best friend. It is strange that the dour Dreiser, famous for naturalistic and pessimistic fiction, should have admired Fort's stories, but when Fort began working on his strange metaphysics, Dreiser gave his estimation of Fort's genius as "simply stupendous", and he coached, corrected, and ushered Fort's work into print. Fort loved going to the library and researching, and he collected on scraps of paper any oddity that struck his fancy, phenomena that he designated beyond the explanatory power of science. Steinmeyer shows that Fort's speculations fit into the fizzy 1920s, and his book sold well. Fort insisted that "... nothing ever has been proved. Because there is nothing to prove." With everything all connected, the distinctions which science made were arbitrary and pointless. The _New York Tribune_ titled its laudatory review of the book "Science Mocked". Steinmeyer concedes that at a time when Gugliemo Marconi and Percival Lowell were telling the public about the endeavors of the Martians, Fort may have had a point. Generally, however, he had little real knowledge of how science worked, and his dismissal of science overall was fatuous. He was more appropriately skeptical of spiritualism, and he refused to be drawn on biblical miracles, because he drew the line at anything happening before 1800. He despised conspiracy theorists.
Fort was shy, and despite his confident prose and extraordinary speculations, he did not enjoy being with others much. Even Dreiser only met with him a score of times. He liked going to the movies. He devised a game called Super-checkers and was pleased with it; it had 400 pieces on a board of 800 squares. He had to play himself in solitaire, because no one else took it up. He hated using the telephone, and he hated dealing with doctors, thus hastening his own death in 1932, at age 57. By that time, he had published three other books along the lines of _The Book of the Damned_. He had a following, although his shyness kept him from enjoying it. There is a British periodical _Fortean Times_ that publishes Fort's style of oddities, but perhaps does not pay attention to the witticisms with which Fort wrote them up; it seems impossible to tell exactly what Fort took seriously and what he didn't. Steinmeyer's entertaining biography gives plenty of details on the enigmatic life of an oddball misfit. There are scientists and literary figures that occasionally hobnobbed with Fort, and many who wrote about him (some in praise), so he was an influential figure. He is thought by skeptics to be credulous and naive, but his writing is full of contradictions and paradoxes. It is tough to give a portrait of a man who could write, "I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes and superstitions. To some degree, I think so, myself. To some degree I do not," or "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written," but Steinmeyer has nicely placed Fort within his times and charted his effects on the years thereafter.
Fascinating Insights into an Odd Character June 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Steinmeyer does a good job of encapsulating the life of Fort, who must not have been the easiest person to research. While a little short on Fort's actual motivation to catalog the world's oddest phenomena, the book provides fascinating accounts of Fort's troubled childhood, adult poverty, note-taking methodology and his strange and lengthy friendship with fellow author Theodore Dreiser. The subtitle "The Man Who Invented the Supernatural" is misleading, but I suspect it may not have been Steinmeyer's idea. It's a fast and curious look into the life of one our grand eccentrics.
 Disturbing Portrait May 19, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Magician and magical historian Jim Steinmeyer has written a carefully "agnostic" biography of that infamous agnostic of pseudoscience, Charles Hoy Fort. By this I mean that Steinmeyer essentially never intrudes with summations, analyses, judgments or conclusions... he gives the facts and lets them speak for themselves. In dealing with Fort, this is probably the correct approach.
Fort was the product of a horrific childhood that would leave almost anyone seriously mentally ill, and indeed as an adult he found no part of society into which he could fit. Dropping out of high school (failing math and science, naturally) he worked as a newspaper reporter, and then tried to make a living as a writer of magazine fiction. His work during this period usually consisted of slice-of-life accounts (including one published novel) of daily existence in the slums and tenements of New York.
At some point he turned to the writing of conventionally crazy pseudoscience, in the now-lost manuscripts he called X and Y. In X he argued that all life on earth is designed, evolved and controlled by intelligent creatures living on Mars. In Y he argued that there is a super-race living in a huge depression at the North Pole. In both works he used the technique familiar from Ignatius Donnelly (and later Immanuel Velikovsky), namely the backing of these wild claims by overwhelming (yet actually irrelevant) numbers of citations from obscure records and documents. Either manuscript could easily have been configured as science fiction, but despite hints from his good friend, novelist Theodore Dreiser, Fort refused to make the conversions. Neither was ever published in any form.
Instead, an inheritance gave him leisure to write the four pseudoscience works for which he is best known, beginning with THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED. (He also appears to have written at least two other books in this vein, which he later destroyed, "M and F" and "WW".) The four published works follow the pattern of X and Y in consisting mainly of summaries of accounts of supposedly amazing phenomena, drawn from old magazines and newspapers, but differ in championing no particular scenario or hobbyhorse. They are well-written, in a somewhat annoyingly "cute" style, and often quite deliberately funny.
Fort really started something, but it's difficult to say precisely just what. Most pseudoscience books of the 20th Century have had a superficially Fortean structure, but actually they jump back to Donnelly, using the structure to support just one particular crazy scenario.
Fort is an important figure in the history of early 20th Century pure-quill craziness, and this carefully-researched biography is very welcome.
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