Publishers Weekly's Book Life Reviews Eric Burns New Book When the Dead Talked... and the Smartest Minds in the World Listened

 

 

Historian Burns (author of 1920: The Year That Made the Decade Roar) illuminates the story of psychics, seances, and the scientists who researched them in When the Dead Talked. Roughly covering the 1840s to the 1920s, Burns puts his talents as a researcher to use to recount the history of spiritualism, from the famous Fox sisters—entrepreneurial spiritualists whose late-in-life claims to have been deceptive Burns doesn’t quite buy—to Thomas Edison’s attempts to build a machine for communicating with the dead. Burns dives deeply into two scientific societies which attempted to prove the truth or fallacy of claims of communication with the dead, the Society for Psychical Research in England and its Ameican counterpart. 

Burns concludes that their efforts, which ascribed validity to some psychic phenomena, deserve to be taken seriously today, arguing “To accept the notion that the smartest minds in the world, thousands of them, engaged in a conspiracy to delude lesser minds is a more preposterous assumption than accepting the veracity of the feats” of the spiritualists. Readers may not be as convinced as Burns of the validity of several of the phenomena that he recounts, even as he attempts to disprove common objections and appeals to the scientific probity of the investigators. But his expertise and skill as a historical storyteller is clear throughout. When the Dead Talked… 

Burns’s deep research is combined with a familiar tone which welcomes the readeris extensively researched, with helpful bibliography and glossary, plus photos of his principal subjects, the psychics and skeptics who investigated them to participate in the same journey that he himself did from skepticism to openness to the reality of psychic phenomena. Readers fascinated by how scientists in the last half of the 19th century thought about psychic phenomena will appreciate Burns’s exploration of this fascinating history. Fascinating study of spiritualism and the scientists who found it credible.

 

Veteran and Emmy-winning broadcaster turned prolific author, Eric Burns, has thoroughly explored the topic with his well-researched When the Dead Talked … and the Smartest Minds in the World Listened, published by Story Merchant Books. Burns has retained The Blaine Group to implement a national public relations campaign to support this book’s launch.