A writer who challenged science with the world's weirdness

By Michael Dirda

Sunday, May 18, 2008; Page BW10

CHARLES FORT

The Man Who Invented the Supernatural

By Jim Steinmeyer

Tarcher/Penguin. 332 pp. $24.95

THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED

The Collected Works of Charles Fort

Tarcher/Penguin. 1,125 pp. $18.95

Charles Fort (1874-1932) isn't remembered today for his humorous, slice-of-life stories set in turn-of-the-century New York. He isn't remembered for his best friend's -- the great American novelist Theodore Dreiser's -- estimation of his genius as "simply stupendous." And he certainly isn't remembered for his novel The Outcast Manufacturers or his abortive memoir Many Parts. No, Charles Fort is remembered -- in some quarters revered -- because he created what biographer Jim Steinmeyer calls "a new kind of ghost story . . . in which it is the cold, hard data that haunts."

For the last half of his adult life, this walrus-like, myopic amateur scholar spent his afternoons at the New York Public Library or the British Museum, combing through newspapers, magazines, medical reports and learned journals for news items that were . . . weird. Inexplicable. That revealed a lot more strangeness in the world than the received wisdom of science would acknowledge.....

Complete review here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/15/AR2008051504284.html

Is there anybody out there, Mr Fort?

CHARLES FORT: THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE SUPERNATURAL by Jim Steinmeyer (William Heinemann, £16.99)

By Harry Pearson
Last updated at 2:57 PM on 28th May 2008

For many of us, the paranormal will, like cheese fondue and Mateus Rose, be forever associated with the 1970s. This was, after all, the decade of Erich Von Daniken, Charles Berlitz and the TV series The Mysterious World Of Arthur C. Clarke.

The Seventies were, as a scientist at Loch Ness recently told a friend of mine, ‘a very credulous era’. This is a fact, as anyone who ever bought a Ronco button-o-matic will testify.

The truth, however, is that the paranormal was fashionable in the 1920s, making it the psychic equivalent of Oxford bags – those wide baggy trousers.

The man credited with kick-starting the weird world as we know it is Charles Fort. Fort’s name may at first seem unfamiliar, but once you know his followers dubbed themselves Forteans, his place in the universe becomes altogether clearer.

Jim Steinmeyer – who wrote a well-received history of the Golden Age of stage magic – has produced a richly entertaining and illuminating biography of the author who brought spontaneous combustion, water-divining and UFOs into the public domain...........

Complete review here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1022492/Is-anybody-Mr-Fort.html