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Showing posts from December, 2025

A Review of Asa James by Jodi Lew-Smith

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  (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...

“Ask and be Answered”: A Review of The Akashic Way: Living Through the Lens of the Akashic Records, by Mary Madeiras

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  (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 ...

A Review of Lost in Time: Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge, by Jack R. Bialik

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  (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...