Customer Reviews

Charles Berlitz's World of the Odd and the Awesome

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What's the connection between one of the most eminent linguist and paranormal activities? Well, amazingly linguistic is not the only skill that Mr. Charles Berlitz masters, he is also well known as the author of paranormal and supernatural books, "The Bermuda Triangle", "The Lost Ship Of Noah", "Atlantis:The Eight Continent", and of course, including this book: "Charles Berlitz's World of The Odd And The Awesome". Contained almost 300 short articles, this book will bring you to a realm of unexplainable in a wide range from Atlantis to zombies, Biblical discoveries to psychical abilities, cryptozoology to UFOs. There're many of the paranormal cases are not so well known to most of the people, to name a few, ancient Russian mummies, underwater living dead and the cannibal trees. Many of the cases are intriguing, and beyong logical, thus this makes reading this book more enjoyable. The language used is simple, clear and understandable. Teenagers and young adults probably would like this book. However, there are many cases that are quite common to most of the paranoraml fans out there, he or she might heard the stories of some of the UFO cases, discoveries Noah's Ark and Atlantis for a thousand times. What makes this book a bit annoying is that the articles did not arrange neither in category nor in alphabetical order. Still, this book is not a bad bargain. What can you ask more for a book that is under $5.00?

With scarcely a page devoted to each topic (he devotes little more than a page to the Loch Ness monster!), this book is way too sketchy to be of interest to anyone who has more than a passing interest in strange phenomena. Like all of Berlitz's books on mysterious phenomena, adequate documentation is lacking-- in this case, virtually nil. This book is all over the map, ranging from the gee-whiz Ripley's Believe It or Not!-type trivia to genuine mysteries to stuff that is just plain nonsensical ("Bikini" and "Tomb of Ice" for example). Pass this by and read something by some of the more careful researchers in the field; Charles Fort, Jerome Clark, and Colin Wilson, for example, are just three writers in the "believer" camp who are infinitely better at dealing with this type of material.