From Norman Mailer's review
of Peter Levenda's Book One—The Nine:
Face-to-face with twenty-five years of research gathered from
no less than forty countries, most writers would have looked to
come up with any number of spy, horror, and suspense novels suggested
by this trove of material. Peter Levenda, however, tackled it
head-on. So, he set himself the near-to-impossible task of pulling
together such diverse threads as pop culture, archaeology, anthropology,
poetry, religion, the occult, and a host of government actions
overt and hidden. In return, he has produced the first installment
of a thesis that is by turns compelling, cautious, maddening,
and intriguing.
This book lives with the premise that there is a Satanic undercurrent
to American affairs. Since there is a world of clues and indications
to support the thesis, but very little qualifies as hard evidence,
the author is enmeshed in a labyrinthine task. Given the bewildering
enormity of the attempt, one can forgive Sinister Forces its serious
faults for in recompense we are offered astonishing coincidences,
improbable but factual interconnections, occasional exposures
of buried government history, outright assassinations and inexplicable
historic conjunctions that scream out for explanation where none
can be provided. Conspiratorialists will drown in new floods of
old forgotten material, rationalists will throw this book across
the room, then get around to picking it up and reading a little
further before they throw it down again in a fury at the uneasy
possibility that the Devil could conceivably also be a part of
our ongoing and inexplicable American history. Worse! What if
it—as Levenda looks to indicate—it all goes back to
the earliest American inhabitants, back to the mysterious mound-building
Pre-Columbian cultures of Kentucky up through the Salem witch
trials on to the Twentieth Century mind-control experiments, the
obfuscations surrounding UFOs, and Manson, and Sirhan, and November
22 in Dallas? The first of these three volumes of Sinister Forces
is already ten books in one. Depending on one’s reading
inclinations, this is either a disaster or a great bargain. |
