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Outstanding
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Entertainment Weekly Tina Jordan
Compulsively readable After reading Blum's mesmerizing account, you might be tempted to dust off that Ouija board.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
She achieves deep poignancy at moments that in less gifted hands could have seemed most laughable. [19 June 2006, p.57]
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Outstanding
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The Independent Gary Lachman
A fascinating, moving and, most importantly, paradigm-challenging account of the lives and work of the many scientists and thinkers who championed the cause of psychical research.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph William Leith
This is history as you want it to be written. As you finish, you search your shelves for other books by the protagonists, other books on the period. When I picked this one up, I would have told you I didn't believe in ghosts. And now I'm not so sure.
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Favorable
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Chicago Sun-Times Roger K. Miller
Blum's book, skillfully organized and felicitously written, lays out the facts like a good, extended piece of newspaper writing and lets the reader decide. Yet she cannot suppress a sense of wonderment that makes her say that writing the book "changed the way I thought. . . . I'm just less smug than I was when I started, less positive of my rightness."
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Favorable
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The Guardian Jad Adams
Blum presents a fascinating story in a very readable but accurate style, though she must have been told that audiences don't like dates in their narratives; I had to keep checking the rather sparse references section to know where I was.
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Favorable
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Library Journal Michael D. Cramer
She keeps the story moving and fleshes out each character. [1 July 2006, p.103]
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Michael Kenney
A compelling account of this eerie subject.
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Favorable
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Salon Laura Miller
One of the peculiarities of this gracefully written and always fascinating book is Blum's noncommittal stance toward the ideas driving most of the society's research.
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Mixed
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San Francisco Chronicle Paul Collins
Blum offers no explanation for why Spiritualism exploded when it did.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Patricia Cohen
Ghost Hunters is less interested in the sociology of bamboozlement than in giving a respectful accounting of what the participants saw and felt. This approach has benefits, but among its drawbacks are the sometimes credulous reports of telepathy, telekinesis or contacts with the dead.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Book Review Anthony Gottlieb
Blum tells her literally wondrous tale very well. But apart from the vague suggestion that it answered a need created by the encroachment of science on religious belief, she offers very little reflection on the question of why spiritualism suddenly became so popular. And perhaps she tells her tale too even-handedly, since readers may be left with the impression that the Society for Psychical Research was on to something.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Dennis Drabelle
But Blum's way with her fascinating material is a bit bloodless. By the end, the reader wants to ask the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (for her 1992 reporting on primate research), "So what do you think about all these weird goings-on?"
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
Blum seems content to relate rather than to analyze; her text lacks analysis. She ends with the patent observation that the conflict between science and the supernatural endures. [15 May 2006, p.503]
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Mixed
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Booklist Gilbert Taylor
Determined to be fair, Blum never scoffs as she narrates the tantalizingly inconclusive results of forgotten research in the history of psychology. [1 Aug 2006, p.12]
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph Duncan Fallowell
Blum just tells the stories and makes no attempt to evaluate them in the light of present knowledge.
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