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Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural | 
 enlarge | Author: Jim Steinmeyer
Publisher: Tarcher
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $12.00
You Save: $12.95 (52%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 16431
Media: Hardcover
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 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New in new dust jacket.
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Product Description
The seminal biography of the twentieth centurys premier chronicler of the paranormal, Charles Forta man whose very name gave rise to an adjective, fortean, to describe the unexplained.
By the early 1920s, Americans were discovering that the world was a strange place.
Charles Fort could demonstrate that it was even stranger than anyone suspected. Frogs fell from the sky. Blood rained from the heavens. Mysterious airships visited the Earth. Dogs talked. People disappeared. Fort asked why, but, even more vexing, he also asked why we werent paying attention.
Here is the first fully rendered literary biography of the man who, more than any other figure, would define our idea of the anomalous and paranormal. In Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, the acclaimed historian of stage magic Jim Steinmeyer goes deeply into the life of Charles Fort as he saw himself: first and foremost, a writer.
At the same time, Steinmeyer tells the story of an era in which the certainties of religion and science were being turned on their heads. And of how Fortsignificantlywas the first man who challenged those orthodoxies not on the grounds of some counter-fundamentalism of his own but simply for the plainest of reasons: they didnt work. In so doing, Fort gave voice to a generation of doubters who would neither accept the straight story of scholastic science nor credulously embrace fantastical visions. Instead, Charles Fort demanded of his readers and admirers the most radical of human acts: Thinking.
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| Customer Reviews:
Riding on a comet... May 5, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
At last a major biography worthy of the man who introduced us to the truly amazing and inexplicable world we inhabit. Not since Damon Knight's 1970 bio has Fort been given his due. Fort came from an odd childhood of upper class indulgence and Dickensian cruelty perpetuated by his father. Fort's personal individuation was one of rebellion against social norms and mindless restrictions leading him to an "on the road" existence of travel, train yards, and down and outs from the backroads of America to cattle ships to Britain.
Fort was Bohemia's bohemian who struggled as a newspaper reporter, starving novelist and hermit in a domestic life surrounded by his devoted wife and research notes. Theodore Drieser was the champion that finally realized the unique genius possessed by Fort and supported him with unwaivering friendship through the remainder of Fort's short but prolific life.
But did he "invent" the supernatural as alleged by the title? Like an eccentric Zen master, Fort directly pointed at the documented realities that intrude into a well ordered empirical universe with distinctly uncomfortable implications. Continuing with the zen metaphor, Fort's "stick that heals" was one of curiosity and doubt. He had possessed a healthy minded agnosticism that was interested in everything because everything is interesting. Rather than "invent" Fort more accurately precipitated what has become known as the supernatural. Among the phenomena he documented were aerial phenonmena later to be called UFO's, vanishing lands, people, vessels and mysterious falls of substances that should not fall upon us are now pillars of the supernatural that continue to baffle and delight.
Fort was a pioneer of an art and/or science that provided us with a lens to view the curious and wonderful world around us in ways not dreamed of in our philosophy. Mr. Steinmeyer, an established writer of magical wonders, is to be thanked for this work that brings the enigmatic Charles Fort to a new generation of readers and potential forteans. Highly recommended.
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