New York, NY (1888PressRelease)
August 19, 2008 - Science fiction moves from cult to pop culture. Conspiracy theories replace trust in civil authority. The idea of “objective truth” becomes just another hegemony imposed from above.
We can thank Charles Fort for the uncertainty of the world we live in today... and we can be sure that he would have found it refreshingly honest. A great American crank in the best sense of the word, Fort (1874–1932) spent his life hunting down reports of “anomalous phenomena”—rains of frogs, cattle mutilations, and UFO sightings—and studying them from a true outsider’s perspective, one that characterized even supposedly impartial science as wearing blinders in its approach to them.
With the rapid rise in interest in Fort’s life and work that has been spurred by modern cultural insecurity, Cosimo is pleased to announce the first ever hardcover edition of the 2002 British paperback. In this modern classic of analytical biography, Colin Bennett examines not only the life of this one-man investigator of real-life X-Files but his work as well, likening him to such diverse figures that loom in the cultural imagination as Lee Harvey Oswald and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
A must-read for fans of the strange, this riveting book explores why the 20th century, which gave rise to conspiracy-theory philosophies and widespread distrust of social authority, embraced Fort so wholly that his name has been immortalized in the adjective Fortean.
About the Author
In the course of a delightfully misspent youth, Colin Bennett was employed as both a musician and as a mercenary soldier. He was far better at the second than at the first. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, he is the author of the novels Infantryman and The Entertainment Bomb, and paranormal nonfiction including Looking for Orthon, a biography of George Adamski; and An American Demonology, about the head of the 1950s UFO-hunting agency Project Blue Book.
POLITICS OF THE IMAGINATION: The Life, Work and Ideas of Charles Fort is published by Cosimo Books and is available from online bookstores. For further information visit cosimobooks.com.
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