Description
This is rich florid funny history with undertones of human grief Knight is shrewd and perceptive he pushes his material into neurobiology into the nature of placebos and expectations and selffulfilling prophecies Knights book is crisp Dwight Garner New York Times
Elegant and eccentric Knights prose glides like mercury and he does not waste a word With deft skill he explores historical theories of perception time death fear
New York Times Book Review
A thoughtprovoking and deeply researched book Knight probes the space between coincidence and the ineffable mystery of supernatural possibilities
NPR Books
Knights prose delights
Wall Street Journal
Stunning An enveloping unsettling book gorgeously written and profound Patrick Radden Keefe New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain
From a rising star New Yorker staff writer the incredible and gripping true story of John Barker a psychiatrist who investigated the power of premonitionsand came to believe he himself was destined for an early death
On the morning of October 21 1966 Kathleen Middleton a music teacher in suburban London awoke choking and gasping convinced disaster was about to strike An hour later a mountain of rubble containing waste from a coal mine collapsed above the village of Aberfan swamping buildings and killing 144 people many of them children Among the doctors and emergency workers who arrived on the scene was John Barker a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital in Shrewsbury At Aberfan Barker became convinced there had been supernatural warning signs of the disaster and decided to establish a premonitions bureau in conjunction with the Evening Standard newspaper to collect dreams and forebodings from the public in the hope of preventing future calamities
Middleton was one of hundreds of seemingly normal people who would contribute their visions to Barkers research in the years to come some of them unnervingly accurate As Barkers work plunged him deeper into the occult his reputation suffered But in the face of professional humiliation Barker only became more determined ultimately realizing with terrible certainty that catastrophe had been prophesied in his own life
In Sam Knights crystalline telling this astonishing true story comes to encompass the secrets of the world We all know premonitions are impossibleand yet they come true all the time Our lives are full of collisions and coincidence the question is how we perceive these implausible events and therefore make meaning in our livesThe Premonitions Bureau is an enthralling account of madness and wonder of science and the supernatural With an unforgettable ending it is a mysterious journey into the most unsettling reaches of the human mind
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