Book-It '10! Book #77
The Fifty Books Challenge, year two! This was a secondhand find.
Title: Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead by Christine Wicker
Details: Copyright 2003, HarperCollins Books
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "In Lily Dale, New York, the dead don't die.
Instead, spirits flit among the elms and stroll along the streets, sometimes dressed in garb more common 120 years ago, when Lily Dale was founded and suffragette Susan B. Anthony was a frequent guest.
According to Spiritualists who have ruled this Victorian hamlet for five generations, the dead don't go away and they stay anything but quiet. Every summer twenty thousand guests come to consult the town's mediums, who can hang out a shingle only after passing a test that confirms their connection to the spirit world.
On the hot June day when reporter Christine Wicker comes to the world's oldest and largest Spiritualist community, she is determined to understand the secret forces -- human or otherwise -- that keep Lily Dale alive. She follows three visitors: a newly bereaved widow; a mother whose son killed himself; and a beautiful, happily married wife whose first visit to Lily Dale brings an ominous warning.
Are the mediums cold-hearted charlatans, as Sinclair Lewis wrote of them? Or are they conduits for a hidden world that longs to bring peace and healing to the living, as psychologist William James and muckraker Upton Sinclair once hoped to prove?
Investigating a movement that attracted millions of Americans in the 1800s and now barely survives, Wicker moves beyond the mediums' front parlors and into the lives that tourists never see. She follows the mediums to a place where what we know and how we know it is the greatest mystery of all."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Lily Dale sounds like a fascinating place and I know several people who have visited and confirmed this.
How I Liked It: The author admits that she isn't sure what kind of book she wants to write. The cover and picture inserts suggest a scholarly history while the text is largely the author's personal experiences within the community over a period of three years.
The book tries to be both a journalistic study of a unique community and a personal memoir of time with said community and it fails at both. The author injects enough of herself into the stories and interactions to be distracting, but not enough so that we actually see her as a character. Also, her constant assertions of herself as a journalist and how she should best write this book as a journalist (the latter being something that would've best been helped by an editor, certainly) leaves the reader wanting her to keep out of it and just report the story, not live it.
Her cast of characters, the supposed centerpiece of the book is also hard to keep straight (the author jolts us in and out of various lives with not enough to really create a story about any of them) and as an almost afterthought, at the end of the text a "Partial Cast of Characters" is offered (wouldn't this have made more sense at the beginning of the book?), the hand of the editor feeling pressed upon it. It adds to the slap-dash, "first draft" feeling of the whole book.
The book raises a few interesting points within its jumble, for example the policy (however hazy and not necessarily the case of all mediums) of mediums not reporting bad news as well as the fact that no matter how tempestuous a relationship people may have had in life, the dead only have positive messages to report from the other side to the mediums' clients. Also interesting is the dispute of mediums over the clarity of messages they can provide (what is an "acceptable" level of clarity versus what's guesswork and possible scam).
Better books have and will be written about Lily Dale so we are free to leave this one, supposedly a revelation as the town is understandably leery of journalists, in rightful obscurity.
Notable: Thankfully, Witches and Pagans are never mentioned within the "New Age" movement, although she does refer to a house as having alternating "goddess" and "angel" decor, among other "New Age" themes.
Title: Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead by Christine Wicker
Details: Copyright 2003, HarperCollins Books
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "In Lily Dale, New York, the dead don't die.
Instead, spirits flit among the elms and stroll along the streets, sometimes dressed in garb more common 120 years ago, when Lily Dale was founded and suffragette Susan B. Anthony was a frequent guest.
According to Spiritualists who have ruled this Victorian hamlet for five generations, the dead don't go away and they stay anything but quiet. Every summer twenty thousand guests come to consult the town's mediums, who can hang out a shingle only after passing a test that confirms their connection to the spirit world.
On the hot June day when reporter Christine Wicker comes to the world's oldest and largest Spiritualist community, she is determined to understand the secret forces -- human or otherwise -- that keep Lily Dale alive. She follows three visitors: a newly bereaved widow; a mother whose son killed himself; and a beautiful, happily married wife whose first visit to Lily Dale brings an ominous warning.
Are the mediums cold-hearted charlatans, as Sinclair Lewis wrote of them? Or are they conduits for a hidden world that longs to bring peace and healing to the living, as psychologist William James and muckraker Upton Sinclair once hoped to prove?
Investigating a movement that attracted millions of Americans in the 1800s and now barely survives, Wicker moves beyond the mediums' front parlors and into the lives that tourists never see. She follows the mediums to a place where what we know and how we know it is the greatest mystery of all."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Lily Dale sounds like a fascinating place and I know several people who have visited and confirmed this.
How I Liked It: The author admits that she isn't sure what kind of book she wants to write. The cover and picture inserts suggest a scholarly history while the text is largely the author's personal experiences within the community over a period of three years.
The book tries to be both a journalistic study of a unique community and a personal memoir of time with said community and it fails at both. The author injects enough of herself into the stories and interactions to be distracting, but not enough so that we actually see her as a character. Also, her constant assertions of herself as a journalist and how she should best write this book as a journalist (the latter being something that would've best been helped by an editor, certainly) leaves the reader wanting her to keep out of it and just report the story, not live it.
Her cast of characters, the supposed centerpiece of the book is also hard to keep straight (the author jolts us in and out of various lives with not enough to really create a story about any of them) and as an almost afterthought, at the end of the text a "Partial Cast of Characters" is offered (wouldn't this have made more sense at the beginning of the book?), the hand of the editor feeling pressed upon it. It adds to the slap-dash, "first draft" feeling of the whole book.
The book raises a few interesting points within its jumble, for example the policy (however hazy and not necessarily the case of all mediums) of mediums not reporting bad news as well as the fact that no matter how tempestuous a relationship people may have had in life, the dead only have positive messages to report from the other side to the mediums' clients. Also interesting is the dispute of mediums over the clarity of messages they can provide (what is an "acceptable" level of clarity versus what's guesswork and possible scam).
Better books have and will be written about Lily Dale so we are free to leave this one, supposedly a revelation as the town is understandably leery of journalists, in rightful obscurity.
Notable: Thankfully, Witches and Pagans are never mentioned within the "New Age" movement, although she does refer to a house as having alternating "goddess" and "angel" decor, among other "New Age" themes.