About book Talking To The Dead: Kate And Maggie Fox And The Rise Of Spiritualism (2005)
I've read over 100 books in 2014 so far, and it has only taken me a few days (at most) to finish any of them, even some of the longer and more difficult ones. Talking to the Dead, however, took me about 3 weeks to finish.I should start off with a disclaimer, for anyone who is reading my review: I am very interested in Victorian Spiritualism, but I am a skeptic. I don't believe that Kate and Maggie Fox, or any 19th century medium for that matter, ever communicated with any spirits. I could go farther than that in explaining my beliefs, but they're sort of irrelevant here. I came into this book expecting to learn about the Fox sisters as a historical phenomenon - not to be convinced that they actually spoke to ghosts. I was frustrated by the author's tone here; despite the fact that the Fox Sisters confessed to fraud late in their lives and even explained how they produced "spiritual phenomena," she still believes that it is likely that the Fox Sisters really could speak to the dead. If you're like me and don't believe in ghosts or spirits, this view of the author's can be extremely grating. Honestly, I wouldn't recommend this book to a skeptic.Besides the fact that this author does not seem very skeptical, I had a number of other issues with the book. The author focuses extensively on Maggie and Kate's early lives, but unfortunately there is very little reliable documentation of this time of their lives. Instead of actual facts, the author engages in a number of speculations. This tendency of hers completely annoyed me. Some of the speculations were relevant, such as descriptions of a typical 19th century woman or girl's life, but others seemed completely pointless, such as speculation about a given person's feelings or motivations. Often the author doesn't present evidence to back up these speculations. They seemed to come out of thin air and didn't seem to be based in fact. I found these speculative parts strange, to be honest.I have a bunch of minor nitpicks as well. I had some issues with the pacing of the story. Like I said, she focuses a lot on the sisters' early lives, so that left little time for the later part of their lives, some of which has more documentation. She also wastes time (in my opinion) going over some very basic US history. This history is important in a general sense, of course, but not necessarily relevant to the subject at hand. Examples include long passages explaining the Civil War, among others. I've taken many US history courses over my life and if I wanted to brush up with a general US history I would go read a book on that. But I wanted to read a book on Kate and Maggie Fox. The author would often end these historical passages with statements like "but it doesn't seem like Kate/Maggie was directly affected by this..." etc. etc. etc. No kidding. I felt like these sections were filler and mostly unnecessary.Lastly, I thought that in the end, the author failed to form a clear picture of the Fox Sisters for the readers. Perhaps that was part of the author's intention, but by the end of the book I felt like I had mostly wasted my time. This may not have been the author's fault - it seems like the Fox Sisters didn't often write revealing letters (or those that existed have been destroyed, I don't know) and as far as I know they didn't keep intimate diaries. Plus, much of their lives has been mythologized, both by contemporaries and later historians. It's hard to separate fact from fiction, and while the author fairly successfully does this, she seems to have lost the genuine Maggie and Kate in the shuffle.If you're looking to learn about Victorian Spiritualism, I'm sure there are some better books out there. I recently read Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. While it suffered from a few of the same issues that this book does (mainly the author's lack of skepticism), I thought it was a much better book. As for a book about the Fox Sisters specifically, I'm not sure what may be better. There are a number of them out there, but I know that many are biased or fabricated (especially the older ones). Nonetheless, I still wouldn't really recommend this particular one.
Spiritualism is one of the earliest uniquely American spiritual movements.While today, with such high-profile 'mediums' (of often dubious legitimacy) such as Sylvia Browne and John Edwards, Spiritualism has become an ingrained part of American culture. Speaking to the dead is its own industry, with Browne alone churning out book after book that are eagerly purchased by her fans - it seems hard to believe that it wasn't always this way - but it was not.Barbara Weisberg's book follows the often tragic lives of the unlikely founders of what would become known as spiritualism. Neither skilled showmen nor experts at deceit, spiritualism was instead founded by two teenage girls, Margaret 'Maggie' Fox and Catherine 'Kate' Fox, who lived in upstate New York state. The young girls began reporting curious rappings in their presence, rappings which were thus explained as being performed by spiritual entities. What began as a curious tale of the spirit of a murdered peddler that communicated with the girls (reportedly, a corpse and a peddler's bag was found, long after the girls had passed away, underneath their parents' house when they began receiving these messages) soon snowballed into a full-scale craze, drawing both avid enthusiasts and skeptics seeking evidence of trickery in equal numbers.Unfortunately, as Weisberg's book displays in detail, the Fox sisters were against more than just skeptics - stifled by social expectation of what constituted womanhood, increasing fame and the stress thereof and, perhaps most tragically, very bad luck in the sphere of romantic relationships.The sisters' lives ended with them angry at their older sister Leah, whom the sisters accused of exploitation and personal tragedies leading to early, alcohol-related deaths.Weisberg offers no answers, which is appropriate in my opinion, since both the sisters' actions are often contradictory (Maggie becoming a staunch Catholic and renouncing spiritualism, only to have a change of heart a year later, for example) and the subject of 'speaking to the dead' being a strictly supernatural, and thus unprovable, phenomenon. Weisberg offers her own opinion of the sisters and the phenomenon, but there are few polemics in the book itself (her opinion is offered as an afterword), simply an exhausting, if tragic, narrative that focuses on the facts.I would highly recommend this book, especially to those interested in curious religious movements in the US, feminist history and Spiritualism itself. While it can be dry in places, the humanity of the women, and the social situation surrounding them, is brought to life.
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Bern , I have read recently my great grandmother was scheduled to be placed in an insane asylum by her grandchildren (not my grandfather) because she was into Spiritualism ,Ladies aide society got her into the Old Soldiers home instead. I am going to have to read this book .
—Bernadette Loeffel-Atkins
It's certainly probably just me, because so many people gave this book top ratings, but while the subject matter was quite interesting, I thought the presentation of it to be just kind of dull. The book runs along the lines of an introduction to Spiritualism (a phrase coined by Horace Greeley (147-148)) in the United States, starting with the Fox sisters, Kate and Maggie, in the late 1840s. It is the author's thought that starting with these two and their experiences with spirit rapping from the time of their childhood, American Spiritualism became a phenomenon. The question is why? I've long been interested in the topic of the Fox Sisters, in fraudulent mediumship and in the growth of the spiritualist movement in general, and although this book is helpful, in hindsight, I probably wouldn't have started with this one (although I certainly would have eventually not missed it) in gaining some knowledge about the subject.The info between the covers is interesting, and I think I might have enjoyed it more with a better presentation of the story.
—Nancy Oakes
The author of the book doesn't take a stand on whether the Fox sisters were frauds or not. Or, rather, she postulates a handful of different scenarios as to the level of fraud they perpetrated. At first this really irritated me -- I wanted an *answer*. But over the course of the book I grew to accept and then appreciate what Weisberg is trying to say. We *can't* know what Maggie and Kate Fox meant to do, not at this late date. All we have is what they said and what others said about them.The Fox girls were the most popular Spiritualists of their time. They were superstar celebrities. This book gives a clear picture of the course of their lives. I could wish we knew more about their motivations and intentions, but we simply don't.
—Sigrid Ellis
