The Secret Life of Nature: Living in Harmony with the Hidden World of Nature Spirits from Fairies to Quarks

According to Tompkins, living spirits, invisible to the untrained and inattentive eye, lie beyond the physical world and animate the world of nature. In what's being billed as a follow-up to Tompkins's coauthored (with Christopher Bird) megabestseller The Secret Life of Plants, Tompkins regales with tales of the clairvoyants, theosophists, occultists, shamans and scientists who have supposedly peered into the immaterial world of fairies, gnomes, bornnies and quarks. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Madame Blavatsky and the alchemist Paracelsus were, he says, all familiar with the forces that ""lead to the knowledge of the world from which our world is derived."" Tompkins includes chapters on more recent explorations, like those involving the use of the hallucinogenic drug yage. While stopping short of advocating tuning in and turning on, Tompkins finds that ""the cure for both our planet and our individual souls is... initiation to clairvoyance,"" which he feels is within the grasp of everyone. Tompkins strains credulity, however, when he reduces the principles of particle physics to a kind of quasi-religion; for example, when he simplistically equates quarks with fairies, forgetting the dramatic differences between describing scientifically and seeing clairvoyantly. (June)