Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

 (Precocity Press, 2022). ISBN: 979-8-9851494-6-3 A 2023 Nautilus Silver Award Winner, this ambitious text (apt that it is published by a press called Precocity) encapsulates the evolution of life from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago to the present, before postulating at length about the possibilities and pitfalls of colonizing space, the Moon, and, far less likely, Mars. With Space X sending up another rocket as I write this review and Disclosure in the news cycle at an unprecedented, eye-opening level, coinciding with a UAP/drone mystery that held America enrapt through the holidays, the subject of colonizing space is certainly topical and worthy of our attention and consideration. After earning an MA in microbiology, Richard M. Anderson went on to a distinguished career as a clinical laboratory bioanalyst, and he brings considerable knowledge to bear over the course of 326 pages. Armed with Anderson’s table of extinction and evolution events (which has a companion tabl...

(Deltrona, FL: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, 2022). ISBN: 978-1-950750-46-7 Five years ago this month, I was introduced to a literary character that I have come to truly love. It is a familial, fatherly love, as I have enthusiastically expressed in my reviews for the each of the books in the Fleur Trilogy: The History of My Body (2016), Tizita (2017), and Return of the Butterfly (2018). Fleur Robins is the offspring of an ultra-conservative US Senator from Pennsylvania and an alcoholic mother who gave birth to Fleur when she was a teenager. In the past, I have likened Fleur to Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Sheila Tubman in Judy Blume’s Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great . But much has changed for Fleur. In the intervening years since Return of the Butterfly , she has become a wife and mother. Her Nobel Prize–winning work (she is a genius with considerable quirks) in Complexity and Chaos Theory in the midst of the increasing chaos on Earth has led her liter...

  (Next Chapter, 2021). ISBN: 9781006495731 “Buy me a drink, Becker, and I will tell you a story.” (Part Three) Spanning four decades in three parts, Tom Vater’s Kolkata Noir is a good old-fashioned detective story with the addition of a love affair never enacted and abundant socioeconomic and political commentary. Part One takes place in 1999 in Calcutta, India. Although thoughts of a hellish place and the Broadway revue Oh! Calcutta! immediately come to mind, the author tells us in the Acknowledgments that “[d]uring the Raj [the period of British rule from 1858 until the independence of India in 1947], Calcutta was the world’s second most economically powerful metropolis.” The story opens with the hunt for suspects in the brutal back-alley murder of Abir Roychowdhury, a powerful and wealthy man whose wife, Paulami, a socialite and well known in her own right, is unfaithful with two men, one of whom—an Englishman—is the principle suspect. Leading the investigation is In...

(Odyssey Books, 2021). ISBN: 978-1922311153 What a fifteen-month journey it’s been. I have detailed the sociopolitical dog and pony show and all its many components in recent reviews of books about a dystopian future, so I won’t take the space to reiterate them here. Unless you are living in a cave at the top of some mountain—which would make it impossible to read this review—you know what they are. As I wrote in those reviews, what seemed before March 2020 to be distant, to be able to be pushed away with a bit of Hope and dash of Belief that Humankind can get its act together, is closer than ever. This, in turn, means that dystopian writers—at least the talented ones—are giving us a handbook, a not-so-distant early warning, about what is almost assuredly to come. Court of the Grandchildren certainly meets these criteria. Well written, with a variety of modes of information delivery that made it an excellent candidate for a stage play (which the authors took advantage of with a vi...

  (Cardiff, CA: Waterside Productions, 2020). ISBN: 9781949001495. You will have already noticed, from the bibliographic information, that this book is unlike others written by a single author, or even a team of authors. Not only is it channeled from a being calling itself Pax, the Divine Wisdom Source—Pax is the uncredited author of roughly half the text. If you’re a cynic who doesn’t believe that it’s possible for a non-corporeal being to communicate with the living, you’ll still get a great deal from this book. The lead author is knowledgeable on a variety of important and sometimes complex subjects, such as alternative fuels, climate change, and nutrition. Reading this book recalled a time when I was beginning my journey as a serious paranormal investigator. A colleague gave me a book by remote viewer Ingo Swann called Penetration . After reading it over the course of a few days, enrapt, I called my colleague and said, “Do you believe this is true? Because if I believe i...

(Deltona, FL: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC, 2018), ISBN-13:   978-0-997951783 Before you read another word of this review, be sure you’ve done one of the following two things (or, if you are feeling generous, both): 1.      Read the previous two books in this series 2.      Read my reviews of the first two books in the series Now we can proceed. There is an ancient Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” Are we cursed? It certainly seems so. The world is, if not IN chaos, on the brink of it. The United States finds itself at a level of Us and Them and Othering that is probably the greatest since the sixties—and there is every reason to believe that this state of things has been carefully engineered. The past two times I’ve left my writing room to go have dinner with friends, the conversation devolved into line demarcating and political posturing. Even when I politely asked that we talk about something else, ...