Brian M. Thomsen (1959–2008)

Oval Office Occult: True Stories of White House Weirdness

Amazon Blurb: "An entertaining and informative look at our paranormal presidencies." --Bill Fawcett, author of Oval Office Oddities

The Discovery Channel's A Haunting meets the History Channel's The Presidents inside this collection of strange-but-true tales of White House weirdness.

Brian M. Thomsen offers a series of nonpartisan accounts of spirits, specters, and supernatural beliefs by and about those who have inhabited the White show more House. Readers will learn which U.S. presidents have claimed to encounter UFOs, and which have been connected to ghosts, as well as which of our nation's leaders have consulted with fortune-tellers or otherwise been associated with other aspects of the occult.

Famous subjects include Warren G. Harding and the curse of the Hope Diamond, the uncanny similarities between the lives and deaths of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, George Washington's visions, Ronald and Nancy Reagan's reliance on psychics, the haunted homes of Dolly Madison and Rosalyn Carter, Jimmy Carter's UFO sighting, Hillary Clinton's experience with channeling, the mysterious curse of Tecumseh, the secret societies of presidents, and much more.

I got the Oval Office Occult through the early reviewer program at LibraryThing. It is my second book through that program. :) I got it very, very quickly. Oval Office is a slender book. I took one look at it and thought, a quick read. It wasn’t. Oval Office Occult wasn’t a hard read, mind, but it didn’t go as quickly as I thought it would either.

I have never read a book quite like this before. I have read plenty of stories about the occult, but they were mostly fiction. And the rare non-fiction book treated the occult rather more seriously than this book did. This one tells all the odd and strange tales that hang about the White House. I think it is a particularly appropriate book to read, considering today is Halloween and the election is only days away.

Each chapter was standalone, so you can skip in and around the book freely. I eventually read every chapter exactly that way, but I do not feel as though I missed anything. I will say that I felt as if the writer was trying his best to be neutral. He did not pay attention to politics or party. He sometimes said how much proof there was for any particular story at the end. That said, there were a lot of stories that didn’t feel paranormal. There were just stories that’d been floating around for a long time.

There are lots of stories I had never heard before. There were also some stories I already knew. I liked the chapters on Washington best.

Grade: B show less

This book is a collection of 15 military sci-fi short stories. I like some sci-fi and I like military history, so I thought the combination could be interesting. Each of the contributors is a military veteran, several are well known sci-fi authors. The stories include military engagements, genetic mutations, alien invasions, and self-sacrifice for the highest cause. There was a good balance between serious, sad, and humorous stories. I think my favorite had to be "The Question" by Patrick A show more Vanner. Basically inter-galactic relations with a new species were ruined due to human allergies. The whole story ends up being an answer to 'the question,' and it's just amusing. There were a couple of stories I didn't enjoy as much, simply due to the level of violence for no apparent reason. They just seemed under-developed. But overall an enjoyable book. show less

The Further Adventures of Beowulf does what it says on the cover. The book starts off with an interesting introduction discussing the legacy of the Beowulf text and Middle-Earth. This is followed by 'The Deeds of Beowulf' translated into prose by John Earle in 1892. This prose version is rather old fashioned and has a few issues with sentence structure, which could have used cleaning up and clarification by an editor, or better yet, the inclusion of a better prose version or even just a show more summary of the Beowulf story. The book then provides 4 fantasy-tales, by 4 different authors, involving the adventures of Beowulf after his run-in with Grendel. These 4 fantasy adventures are written in a style that reminds me of a typical Sword & Sorcery/ Forgotten Realms Novel, but each short story is rather interesting, or at least entertaining. Each chapter/story is followed by a short (rather pointless) interlude which doesn't fit and could have been left out. The book also includes a rather useful (especially for scholars of Beowulf) partial, annotated bibliography of the Beowulf cannon through to current times.

In short, this is an entertaining, but not spectacular, fantasy anthology featuring the further adventures of Beowulf that could have used improvements with some of the other material. show less

I just had to stop for a few moments while cataloging my Forgotten Realms books and say a few words about this book. It is so bad I don't really know where to begin. I guess with relating how cheesy it is. I have enjoyed FR and Dragonlance for almost twenty years now and some of their books are obviously better than others, but the sheer level of absurdity in this one in particular was way too much to take. How about a little merchant gnome named 'Gnorm', and every body knows his name, or show more the airship Minnow that obviously crashes in some odd corner of the realms. Now, in its favor is the fact that there are descriptions of rarely travelled corners of a vastly chronicled shared fantasy world for gamers like myself, but my god! There are limits of goofiness beyond which the human mind can never recover. Seriously, Forgotten Realms novels are on the whole pretty good fantasy stories, but this one is for veterans only. Newer readers should stick to the Salvatore Drizzt series, Douglas Niles' Moonshae, Ed Greenwood (the Realms creator) or really about any of them but Once Around the Realms. show less