Hpb Extraordnry Lif C

This overstuffed, sometimes absorbing biography aims to rehabilitate Russian-born Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), whose studies in religion, philosophy and psychic power were overshadowed in 1885 by her ``exposure'' as a fraud. Cranston (coauthor of Reincarnation in World Thought ) has gathered an enormous amount of research on Blavatsky's upbringing, background and travels, unskeptically accepting claims of her subject's psychic powers. She also traces the growth of the Theosophical Society, which Blavatsky helped found in 1875 and which not only flourished in the West but also, according to Cranston, spurred the revival of Hinduism and Buddhism in the East. She describes how Blavatsky's writings fueled the anti-vivisection movement, seemed to predict certain scientific discoveries and presaged the revival of beliefs in both reincarnation and the New Age. Though Cranston does not assess Theosophy today, she notes its influence on various writers, artists and composers, including Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Kandinsky, Gauguin and Sibelius. Photos not seen by PW. $50,000 ad/promo. (Jan.)