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This excellent piece of popular scholarship has been on my "to read" list for many years and I was glad to finally get the opportunity to read it. Blum, a science journalist by profession, does an excellent job of telling a captivating story about the foundation of the SPR (in England) and the ASPR (in America) at the end of the 19th-century and into the first decade of the 20th, as well as the continual antagonism between the founding figures of psychical research and their more "scientifically minded" colleagues. Several times while reading the book I thought how this story would make a very interesting film. But even aside from Blum's talents as a writer the book showcases her excellent use of scholarly resources (particularly the tremendous amount of archival material she had to wade through to extract this story).

One thing I found particularly interesting is that, in spite of the title that highlights William James as the central figure of the book, it is actually Leonora Piper who stands firmly at the center of events. Piper, a non-professional medium (in the sense that for much of her life she did not hustle business for herself, but instead worked gratis or for the research purposes of the A/SPR exclusively), is a fascinating and overlooked figure in the histories of spiritualism and psychic phenomena. Even Blum, who admits in the Acknowledgements that her outlook on psychic phenomena was changed by the writing of the book and especially by the A/SPR's extensive evidence of Piper's inexplicable successes in "spirit communication," finds the evidence on Piper puzzling and convincing...though of what exactly it is convincing of is still ambiguous. For me, Piper's incredible talent, unassuming manner (she hid her talents and never boasted or self-aggrandized as so many other mediums did) won me over. She's the real hero of this story and all the more so for the suffering both the A/SPR and its antagonists put her through in their "studies" of her work.

Blum counters this positive portrait of a remarkable medium with the more ambiguous and disturbing portrayal of Eusapia Palladino, a rough-around-the-edges Italian medium who was often caught "cheating" during her seances, but also seemed to manifest some genuinely puzzling phenomena (including the first reported instance of "ectoplasm"). The two mediums similar and yet, in many ways, contrasting reputations and fates and Blum skillfully uses these two women as a means to structure the second half of her study.

This is a truly interesting and inspiring piece of writing and research.