THE GIFT: ESP—The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People

In the 1930s J.B. Rhine launched a series of experiments focusing on extra sensory perception (ESP) at Duke University's Parapsychology Lab. To both accolades and criticism from the scientific community, he argued that the ability of a statistically significant number of subjects to accurately guess the order of randomly arranged cards established ESP's existence. Rhine's daughter Feather, an experimental and clinical psychologist and director of the Rhine Research Center, with the assistance of Schmicker (Best Evidence ), draws on a database of thousands of reported cases to present a variety of intriguing, if not fully convincing, accounts that, she says, can't be explained except as instances of ESP. There are three types of stories: precognitive (the ability to foresee an event), clairvoyant (witnessing an event at a distance as it occurs) and telepathic (reading another's mind). There are harrowing tales of mothers who sense that one of their children is in danger, as well as young children apparently able to sense what a parent is thinking. Feather includes a number of examples of people who claim to have had a premonition of 9/11. Although the author strains for an open-minded approach, she states clearly that she accepts the validity of psychic experiences. This collection of anecdotes will appeal most to those who share her convictions. Agent, Nat Sobel. (May)