Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(Tulsa, OK: Jenkin Lloyd Jones Press, 2021). ISBN: 978-0-9755389-0-6 As I write this review, Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a much talked-about city. It’s the official capital of Route 66 as the Mother Road begins its Centennial celebrations. Beyond Tulsa King , with Sylvester Stallone, and Killers of the Flower Moon (the David Grann book and Martin Scorsese film), The Lowdown , a “love letter to Tulsa” starring Ethan Hawke (announced for a second season recently) has everyone talking. I first fell in love with Tulsa (and realized its sociopolitical complexities) in the summer of 2019, when I was hired to portray Ernesto “Che” Guevara for a 3-week Chautauqua tour that started there. Protests were loud and increased as I moved west across Oklahoma, portraying this controversial physician and revolutionary. I returned 3 years later as Beat poet and activist Allen Ginsberg. The protests came from somewhat separate sectors, but were essentially the same. How fitting to have a police officer stan...

  (Virginia Beach, VA: köehlerbooks, 2025). ISBN: 979-8-88824-930-7 Asa James is a beautifully written, poetic novel rendered in the tone of the time of which it talks. It’s cinematic and evocative, like the great English classics that have endured through time. Supporting and enhancing the text are illustrations of flora and fauna in the part and chapter titles. As we’d expect, the Prologue begins on a proverbial dark and windy New England night in late autumn 1851. Sister Ruth, who co-runs the local poor farm (which services unwed mothers and orphans), finds a baby in a shack in the woods beneath its dead mother. Rats have gotten at the baby’s face… Chapter 1 jumps 24 years, and the baby, our titular character, is now grown into a restless young man with dreams of being a naturalist like Darwin. Asa’s stumbling onto a secret is the novel’s inciting incident; the hero’s call to adventure. Now a stranger in a strange land—economically and socially rather than geographica...

  (Los Angeles, CA: Precocity Press, 2025). ISBN: 979-8-9931150-9-2 Over the past twenty years, I’ve reviewed more than a dozen books written by channelers of one kind or another. Some of these books have been written in conjunction with those same Masters, Teachers, Councils, Ascended Beings, angels, and others providing the answers to the channelers’ questions, asked on their own behalf or those of their clients. In addition, I’ve read the books and listened to and watched the presentations of well-known channelers, such as Esther Hicks and Darryl Anka, who channel Abraham and Bashar, respectively. I’ve also read the Seth and Emmanuel transmissions and the lengthy and complicated Urantria Book . Living for nearly three decades with a respected psychic who receives automatic writing transmissions, spontaneous visitations by myriad nonhuman entities, and who has helped dozens of clients connect with loved ones over the years (and assisted with two murder investigations), I can ...

  (Maitland, FL: Mill City Press, 2024). ISBN: 979-8-8685-0229-3 I’m going to start this review with a question. How secure is humankind’s accumulated knowledge? Take a moment to think about it—the oldest known cuneiform tablets are approximately 5400 years old. The cave paintings in Lascaux might be as old as 22,000 years old. Yet, for all of our supposed technological sophistication, VHS tapes and audio cassettes degrade after 30 years, a DVD may last a century (we won’t know until we know), and floppy disks only last 15 years (although they are useless unless you collect and have the expertise to maintain older computers and disk drives). Consider as well that digital files are susceptible to corruption, being accidentally deleted, or being made obsolete by new software. In the case of a massive solar flare, a great deal could be lost in the blink of an eye. These sobering facts and more are the core subjects of Jack Bialik’s impressively and expansively researched book on...

   (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2025). ISBN: 978-1-63149-477-2 Ever since her adventurous life and tragic murder by an unknown assailant on February 3, 1889, Myra Shirley (aka Belle Starr, the “Bandit Queen”) has occupied a central position in the pantheon of Wild West Outlaws—bloodthirsty, larger than life; hero to some, villain to others. The problem in Myra’s case is that most of what we have been told by the press, the entertainment industry, and a slew of biographers is somewhere between exaggeration and lies. Michael Wallis made it his mission to remedy this injustice as only this celebrated historian and author can. Belle Starr is several books in one… part biography, part multifamily genealogy, and part exploration of the sociopolitical landscape of America in the mid- to late 1800s, with impressive explications of the early history of Missouri, the US Civil War, the free and slave state border feuds, and the mythologies and realities of other Old West lumin...

   (Prince George, BC, Canada: Dimensionfold Publishing, 2025). ISBN: 978-1-998395-21-7 In my back cover blurb for this book, I stated, “Ken Goudsward, who is steadily earning a place among the most respected researchers offering heavily researched, technology-based reinterpretations of ancient history, offers a salient, sensible set of explanations for the who, when, why, and how of one of Earth’s most enduring mysteries—the pyramids. From the wrongly mundane, to the genuinely compelling, to the recently ridiculous, Goudsward takes on prior theories and offers us solid, scholarly insights and eye-opening new hypotheses.” Having read this book a second time, I stand by this statement all the more. In 107 succinct, easy to understand pages, while providing abundant photos, diagrams of the interiors of several pyramids, and technical charts, Goudsward takes us through myriad mistaken information concerning pyramids around the world and offers his assessment of a handful of m...