Review of 'American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technologt' on Goodreads
1 star
Only repetition could allow a 244 page book to be this shallow.
The author's doctorate in religious studies should have made her well-qualified to meaningfully expand on Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia (of which she claims to be a fan), but she instead betrays an ignorance of its contents, presenting material covered in it as though original, failing to mention important and relevant insights from it when covering that detail, and at one point, incomprehensibly claiming (apropos of nothing & against all evidence) that Vallee couldn't possibly be familiar with the work of Swenenbourg.
The book is framed by an extended narrative section in which the author repeats the claims of a cartoonishly obvious con artist.
Structurally, the book is a mess. In the narrative sections, we often jump around in time three to four times in a single paragraph. Even outside of those sections, sentences are choppy and confusing: …
Only repetition could allow a 244 page book to be this shallow.
The author's doctorate in religious studies should have made her well-qualified to meaningfully expand on Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia (of which she claims to be a fan), but she instead betrays an ignorance of its contents, presenting material covered in it as though original, failing to mention important and relevant insights from it when covering that detail, and at one point, incomprehensibly claiming (apropos of nothing & against all evidence) that Vallee couldn't possibly be familiar with the work of Swenenbourg.
The book is framed by an extended narrative section in which the author repeats the claims of a cartoonishly obvious con artist.
Structurally, the book is a mess. In the narrative sections, we often jump around in time three to four times in a single paragraph. Even outside of those sections, sentences are choppy and confusing: consistently too short, with clauses clearly edited in from other, barely-related sentences.
Aside from a vague gesture in the direction of media theory that would work better as a Guardian op-ed and a couple catholic-miracle deep cuts already covered better in Vallee, there is nothing here that someone with a casual interest in UFO lore would not already be familiar with (including the idea, repeated about 20 times in the first chapter and only slightly less often throughout the rest of the book, that religious studies scholars do not make judgements about the object-level validity of religions -- something everybody who has heard the term 'religious studied' knows).
I wanted to like this book -- or else I wouldn't have spent twenty five dollars on it. I'm not mad; just disappointed.
