JavronORwrangle

Rollicking Real-Life Adventure … and the birth of the British Empire

Revisado: 12-30-24

Excellent history told with precision, wit and style. I learned much I didn’t know about this audacious explorer and pirate.

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Charming and Spooky Tales From the Celtic Lands

Revisado: 01-21-21

I have this book in printed form, and had flipped through it here and there. Lots of interesting Celtic examples of fairy tradition but not much narrative. It's more of a travelogue, collecting stories as the (American) author moved from Ireland to Isle of Man to Wales to Scotland to Cornwall to Brittany.

But having heard and deeply enjoyed this narrator Jack Chekijian's reading of Yeats' "The Celtic Twilight," I gave this book a listen and it's just a tremendously soothing, deep performance. You can fall asleep to it, or you can be enthralled by daylight. (I listened to some on a long drive through the countryside and it enjoyed it immensely.)

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Wonderful introduction to a paranormal iconoclast

Revisado: 09-23-20

I have previously read three books by John Keel, the popular "Mothman Prophecies," and his lesser-known and more philosophical cult classics, "The Eighth Tower" and "Operation Trojan Horse." But I first read them some 20 years ago, so when I got an Audible suggestion to *listen* to a Keel book, I figured I'd give it a try.

Because I had misplaced the paperback of "The Eighth Tower" and had been thinking about it lately. With all the recent hype with the Navy pilots chasing around their little blobs of light and acting like this hasn't happened fairly regularly for a hundred years, I guess I wanted to check in with John Keel again. After all, he jumped off the "E.T. hypothesis" bandwagon a half-century ago! Like Jacques Vallee and J. Allen Hynek, who were scientists and astronomers studying the UFO problem for the U.S. government's public investigation in the late 1960s.

If you read Keel, you know he's got this tone. It can be flippant, obnoxious, mocking, etc. The ideas are incredible. The links between unexpected phenomena are convincing. The overall picture is astounding, although less of a surprise if you have an interest in religions of the world and especially Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist ideas. Fifty years later, and a lot of it sounds like quantum physics! But that tone could be tough to parse.

This narrator, Michael Hacker, has done a bunch of Keel books. And *this* collection is the first of Keel's books that I'm hearing before reading in print. I liked the others, hadn't heard of this newer collection, and it's just a delight. By giving it a real *performance,* in a voice that seems to be channeling John A. Keel, we really get a sense of Keel on late-night paranormal radio, spinning yarns and giving the latest Fortean reports. Or campily giving a dramatic speech at a UFO conference (several such speeches are in this book) that is sure to enrage the true believers in the alien astronauts. Highly recommended. And honestly with some insights that are not in other books that I'm aware of, especially his bullet-point list of UFO experience types that should be as well known as Hynek's close encounters scale.

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