Staretz Encounter: A New Age Thriller [Paperback]

Marc J. Seifer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 6, 2003

Delving into thelabyrinthine quagmire known as the paranormal, Staretz Encounter is the storyabout news reporter, Rudy Styne, from New York City, and his Eurasiancounterpart, Dr. Imo Bern, a neuroscientist from a secret parapsychology laboratoryin Siberia. The Soviet Union has collapsed, Eurasia is in turmoil. A right-wingextremist, Petar Bonzovalivitch, has come to the fore. Marshalling a cadre ofpsionic soldiers whose brains have been rewired, Bonzovalivitch launches aclandestine operation to topple the West and restore the empire that was onceRussia. His head of psi-ops is black magician Dr. Georgi Boshtov, ex-KGB agentand grand-nephew of Gregori Rasputin. Their target for capture is Egyptiansuperpsychic Abdullah Manu.A controversialcelebrity, Manu's psychic feats have splintered the scientific community. Fromthe point of the view of the media, Manu is passed off as a charlatan, and theparapsychologists who study him, like NYU physics professor Jay Ketchembach,are billed as pseudoscientists.Rudy Styne,reporter for Modern Times, wakes up one morning to a foreboding dream whichcomes true later in the day. Having never had a psychic experience before, thereporter decides to research the topic for an article for the magazine. At thesame time, he also begins to uncover Petar Bonzovalivitch's nefarious plan andalso interview Professor Ketchembach and Abdullah Manu. Eventually, Rudy andhis girlfriend, Chessie Barnsworth, meet up with heartsick scientist, Imo Bern,at an international conference on psychotronics. Bern, who was performing thebrain operations necessary for the creation of the legion of human cyborgs,tries to defect and pass his knowledge to the West as Rudy attempts to persuadean all too skeptical news community that Bonzovalivitch is more than anoutrageous buffoon.As the storyprogresses, Rudy visits psychic researchers and an avatar in search forultimate truths, only to return to New York to find his local guru, ProfessorKetchembach, murdered. Georgi Bosht

Editorial Reviews

Review

An espionage thriller, (a la Tom Clancy).... you write with great intelligence and authority . -- Nicolette Phillips, New Vision

I couldn't take myself away from it. I wanted to see what happened next. -- David Kraueter, author of Radio and Television Pioneers

About the Author

Editor ofMetaScience, A New Age Journal on Consciousness, Marc J. Seifer, Ph.D., hastaught courses on psychology and consciousness research at such institutions asProvidence College and the University of Rhode Island for over 25 years. Havingworked with and interviewed a number of the world's greatest living psychicsincluding Dean Kraft, Ingo Swann, Matthew Manning and Uri Geller, Dr. Seifer isalso a science writer. With more than 70 publications in periodicals such asWired, Cerebrum, Hands on Electronics, Parapsychology Review, Journal ofPsychohistory, Lawyer's Weekly and Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Dr.Seifer is an internationally recognized authority on the inventor Nikola Teslaand also as a handwriting expert. Featured in The Economist, Rhode IslandMonthly, Glamour and Cosmopolitan and on TV on the History Channel andAssociated Press Television News for his work in graphology, and in ScientificAmerican, New York Times, Nature, Library Journal and The Washington Post forhis work on Tesla, he has lectured at such institutions as the United Nations,Cambridge University, Oxford University, University of Vancouver, City Collegeof New York, Long Island University, Brandeis University, New York PublicLibrary, Colorado College, Cranbrook Retreat, LucasFilms Industrial Light &Magic and West Point Military Academy, as well as in Boston, Chicago, ColoradoSprings, Denver, Detroit, Providence, New York, Santa Fe, Jerusalem, Haifa andZagreb. His lecture on the topic 'Precognition, Synchronicity and theStructure of Time' was given as a poster session at the 'Towards aScience of Consciousness' symposium which was held in Tuscon in April 1996and at the University of Rhode Island in 2001.?Listings include Who's Who in the World and Who's Who in Science andEngineering, Marquis' editions.His latest workWIZARD: THE LIFE & TIMES OF NIKOLA TESLA (Citadel Press) was boxed andstarred by Publisher's Weekly, featured in a three-page review in ScientificAmerican as 'a serious piec

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: AuthorHouse (October 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1410768244
• ISBN-13: 978-1410768247
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,918,121 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Worthwhile Ride, January 4, 2005

By 

Lilly - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Staretz Encounter: A New Age Thriller (Paperback)

Because I learned so much from Seiferšs first book WIZARD, which is a biography on the inventor Nikola Tesla, I decided to check out STARETZ ENCOUNTER, even though it was a novel. Not only was I not disappointed, I was truly amazed. I couldnšt tell where reality ended and fiction began. The story reads like a real-life drama, kind of remindful in tone of THE FIRM or MARATHON MAN. It is a tale about the American news reporter Rudy Styne (a take-off on the name Rudolf Steiner??) who begins to study the bizarre world of the paranormal and along the way discovers a plot by ex-KGB right-wingers to murder Western neuroscientists who are studying ESP. Some of the characters seemed to be based on real people. For example, Abdullah Manu was very remindful of Israeli spoonbender Uri Geller.

I liked very much Seiferšs attempt to show actual experiments in the field of parapsychology as the plot follows Styne through the literal mind-field of the world of ESP. I enjoyed the relationship between Styne and his girlfriend, Chessie. Stynešs alter ego, Imo Bern and his brother an Olympian also humanize the story.

This is by no means a simple tale, for just as we follow Stynešs investigation, we also, through Imo's eyes, go into the heart of Siberia to enter a top-secret underground Russian parapsychology lab. Imo is a three-dimensional character torn between his duty to his nation and the duty to his own soul as he, and we, the reader, grimace during the grisly experiments he must perform on the brains of live monkeys and later on humans. Two of the characters in this book are actually monkeys. There are also very scary villains

One of the highlights for me in this story is the ability of the author is to hold the reigns on the far out stuff so that everything that does happen seems possible, even though the book covers such far-out topics as ghosts, psychokinesis, levitation and mental telepathy. Fun and thought provoking.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Message from the Author, October 21, 2003

By 

Marc Seifer "Author" (Narragansett, RI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Staretz Encounter: A New Age Thriller (Hardcover)

There were two events that sparked the writing of STARETZ ENCOUNTER. (1) The arrest in Moscow in 1977, of American news reporter Robert Toth by the KGB, for obtaining a paper on telepathy and brain-wave biofeedback, and (2) The shabby treatment superpsychic Uri Geller received from the American press after being tested successfully at Stanford Research Institute and other U.S. military think tanks. Except for the fair front-page coverage in The New York Times, practically every other media outlet including the TV networks ABC, CBS & NBC, and also Time and Newsweek, reported the Toth arrest, yet purposefully edited out the topic of the science paper he received!

This slanted coverage has influenced the universities. For all intents and purposes, no major physics or neurology department in this country is studying such a topic as telepathy, even though the evidence for its existence is overwhelming. It is for these reasons that I wrote the novel. A fictional thriller with a sci-fi twist, STARETZ ENCOUNTER takes the reader into the fantastic world of the paranormal, as the story also weaves its way not only through New York and its subway system, but also to Antigua, Florence. Bhutan, Egypt, Japan, and also to a secret underground parapsychology laboratory buried in the heart of Siberia. A comprehensive bibliography has been included at the end which gives the facts behind the yarn.

Marc J. Seifer, Ph.D.

FROM THE BACK COVER:

Like a journey through the Major Arcana, Staretz Encounter takes the reader into the bizarre and mind-boggling world of the paranormal. I enjoyed Marc Seifer's book thoroughly. URI GELLER, Paranormalist Extraordinaire

This is a teriffically original book, with elements of satire as well. Dr. STANLEY KRIPPNER, author of Song of the Siren