Title: The Haunting of America
Authors: William J Birnes & Joel Martin
Published Year: 2009
Pages: 497
This isn't your normal everyday ghost story book that holds just ghost stories. Instead what you'll find is a more textbook like book that looks into different parts of our American history that deal with the paranormal realm of ghosts and explains how those events helped shape our history here in America. So in other words it is a cultural study of how paranormal events have played a role in how our country has become what it is today and what effects those events have had on our country here in the United States of America (I say our because I write this blog from the U.S.A. and that is just where my mental picture is formed).
The book includes such events as the Salem Witch Trials, our founding fathers and the relevance of certain things they used in designing some of our most basic everyday items, the rise of spiritualism and the use of mediums as well as the influence of Houdini on our culture. Some of these you may have already looked into and researched, and so have I. However, there seemed a difference here to me in the way the authors presented all the cases. I have read a lot of negative views on this book, but if you are interested in the paranormal even a little bit it will do you good to at least browse through it and see if you can find something you have not come across in the past.
Since it is presented similar to a textbook some of the entries can get drawn out and seem like they are taking forever to get through. My advice is to work your way through the book and that if you feel like you've hit a brick wall in your reading, stop take a break and read something else for awhile; you can always come back and pick up where you left off if you are feeling overwhelmed.
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