Book and Movie Reports by Ed

Book report: Extraordinary Knowing, by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer An expensive harp was stolen from Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer’s daughter in Oakland, California. All usual efforts to find the thieves and the harp failed. A friend suggested that Mayer contact a dowser, one of those guys who find water with a stick, in Arkansas. On a whim, she called him. Over the phone, from two thousand miles away, he described where in Oakland the harp was located. She made inquiries and within two days found the harp where the dowser described. That incident turned her ideas of human perception upside down. A well-known psychoanalyst and psychological researcher, she set out to try to learn more about what she calls “anomalous cognition.” Her grounding in scientific skepticism is evident in the book. She clearly understands good experimental design and proper statistical analysis of results But she is also willing to listen to anecdotal accounts, and the discrepancy between the two is striking. Contrary

Movie report: Alice in Wonderland (2010) A few words about my qualifications. I’ve read the two Alice books umpteen times. I’ve seen at least half a dozen movie and TV versions of the stories, and a couple of stage versions. I’ve been on the ride at Disneyland. And I’ve listened to Jefferson Airplane. So, I’m familiar with the Alice story. That said, if you’ve never seen an Alice in Wonderland movie before, Tim Burton’s version is not the one you should start with. It has none of the wit and cleverness and sly wordplay of the books or the best of the movies. If you started with this version, you would wonder why Alice is such a big deal to people, kind of like reading ads for Christmas sales and wondering how anyone could build a religion around such things. Mind you, this version has some good parts. It starts years after the events in the original two books. Alice is now a nineteen-year-old young lady, about to become engaged to an upper-class-twit-of-the-year on the Victorian