MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE
Courtenay Raia is a member of the humanities faculty at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. She is a recipient of the JHBS John C. Burnham Early Career Award, and her online lecture series at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been recognized for excellence by Stanford University's Continuing Studies Program.
This is easily the best book I have read on this important chapter of Western intellectual history. Raia's general methodology and conclusions about an alternate route to modernity and a potential epistemology that never really took hold (but still might) are powerfully persuasive, historically correct, and much in need at the moment. We need this book. We need this view on the table, this 'third thing' (tertium quid) beyond the traditional belief systems of faith and the naive positivisms of materialistic interpreted science. The New Prometheans is not just another in that long, footnoted list of books on nineteenth-century mesmerism, spiritualism, and Victorian psychical research. Instead, it's a rich display of historical-critical readings, of biographical contextualizations, and of erudite philosophical discussions of the history of science, of technology, and of Western thought. A beautifully written and fascinating study. --Jeffrey Kripal, author of Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions Times Higher Education [Raia] has taken four figures associated with the SPR - William Crookes, Myers, Lodge and Lang - and created a series of linked biographies. . . . The result is a palimpsest, for each of these men, of the public and private, one that offers valuable insights into fin de siecle Britain and the new spirituality that tormented, in different ways, all of these individuals. . . . In recreating the ambition of a number of British thinkers in the late 1800s as they step knowingly into the shadows, it is unrivalled. On finishing the book, you take away a sense not just of the brilliance of men such as Myers, but also of their courage in defying the expectations and small-mindedness of their contemporaries. -- Times Higher Education The New Prometheans is a useful contribution to our understanding of the SPR, and anyone with some prior knowledge who wants to know more about early psychical research, and the complexities of the dynamic intellectual context that characterised its heroic period, will be able to appreciate just how groundbreaking its pioneers were. --Tom Ruffles Fortean Times
