Nonfiction Book Reviews

When Rabbit Howls by Truddi Chase is, by far, the most unusual book I have ever read.  It was recommended to me by Stephanie of Rocket Scientist as a good book to read if interested in multiple personalities.

I have to say, I haven’t ever read or watched anything about multiple personalities before, so I started this book with a clean slate.  Even so, this book blew me away.  I don’t even know where to start.  I guess the general outline of the book would be as good as any…

Truddi Chase was two years old when her mother left her father, and moved in with her stepfather.  This turned out to be a Very Bad Thing in Truddi’s life, because the stepfather was the biggest slimebag to ever walk the earth.  He raped Truddi, at age two.  The sexual abuse continued unabated until her teenage years, when her mother finally, finally, threw the guy out.

On top of that, Truddi was also subjected to emotional and physical abuse by both her mother and her stepfather.  Her mother knew what the stepfather was doing to her daughter, but instead of defending her daughter, she blamed the daughter for all of it, saying that she was a “dirty” person, and that it was all her fault that this was happening to her.  There were also step-siblings in the picture who were also being abused, although Truddi doesn’t focus on that very much.

There is much, much more to the emotional, sexual, and physical abuse than what I’m stating above, but it was hard enough to read the first time around - I don’t think I can bring myself to type it out.  The bottomline is, the overwhelming pain and degradation was so extreme, Truddi’s mind formed other personalities in order to deal with it all.

There are several things that are fairly common when someone has multiple personalities:

First, the core personality is the one that was present at birth, and that personality is still around and available.

Second, most counselors try to help the personalities reintegrate into one, so that there is only one person left inside of the body.

Neither of those statements are true in Truddi’s case.  When she was raped by her stepfather at age two, her core personality died, and her multiple personalities were born.  Two core personalities came into being: One that was the child personality, and one that eventually became the adult personality.  On top of those two came 90+ other personalities, all of them serving their own functions in support of Truddi.  Some personalities died, and only an echo of them was left.

Sound confusing?  Oh yeah.  This was a mind-bending book.  The multiple personalities called themselves as a whole “the Troops,” and it was the Troops who actually wrote the book.  If you look at the front cover, it says, “The Troops for Truddi Chase” as the author.

When the counselor talked to Truddi, he could see differences in her as he spoke to her, depending on which personality was controlling her.  She was tested, and there were measurable differences in speech pattern, brain wave activity, intelligence level, handwriting, posture, voice, etc, depending on the personality.  Even her eye color and cheekbone structure changed.

Get this: Some of the personalities had allergies, so during allergy season, they couldn’t come out front and be in control, because then Truddie would have been miserable.  Oh, and when one personality was in control, Truddi tested positive for pregnancy.  As soon as another personality took over, the pregnancy disappeared.

It was a mind-blowing book.  I had absolutely no idea any of this existed.  And because the book was written by the Troops, you got to see all of this from their perspective - talking to each other, talking to the counselor, doing the day-to-day tasks required to live.

I think one of the hardest things to understand was how utterly difficult this was for the woman.  The Troops created a personality that knew nothing of any abuse, so she could be the front to the world.  This personality did not think by itself, or have any desires by itself - it only did what the other personalities directed it to, which isn’t something you (or this personality) find out until late in the book.  That part just made my head hurt.

After the book was released, Truddi went on tour - she appeared on Oprah and the Phil Donohue Show.  I tried to find clips online from those appearances, but came up empty handed.  I did find out that a reporter from the Washington Post searched for Truddi’s family, and from there, found out that all of the step-brothers and sisters supported Truddi’s story, and even said that Truddi didn’t reveal all in her book: They said that on top of sexual abuse from the stepfather, she also suffered from sexual abuse from the mother too.

That was never once even hinted at in Rabbit Howls, so I’m guessing Truddi’s personalities suppressed that information very, very deep.  On the other hand (not surprisingly) the stepfather denied everything.  Wow, who saw that coming?

I tried to find follow-up information on Truddi - where is she now, how is she doing, are all of the personalities still there, etc, but came up with zip.  It’s as if she fell off the face of the planet.  If anyone has any information on what happened to her after the finish of the book, I’d love to hear about it.

I don’t know how to rate this book.  As with everything to do with it, I’m at a loss.  So I’m going to do something I’ve never done before: I’m not going to rate it.  I just don’t see how to attach a number to this book.

I will put this out there: Please, please, do not give this to your children or teenagers to read.  This is an extremely difficult book to read in terms of descriptions of different abuse that happened; if it were a movie, it would be rated X.  If language and sexuality bother you, absolutely do not pick this book up.

On the other hand, if you’re wanting to learn more about the multiple personality world, and are not easily offended, you’ll definitely want to read this.  As far as I know, this is the only multiple personality book written by the personalities themselves.  It is a rare glimpse into that world - not a pretty one, not an easy one, but one worth finding out about nonetheless.  It was hard enough for me to read this book - I cannot imagine living it.

Hava

PS If you’re interested in an in-depth look at When Rabbit Howls and multiple personality disorder in general, be sure to check out Trauma, Testimony, and Fictions of Truth: Narrative in When Rabbit Howls. It was an interesting (but long!) article that I thought did justice to the book.

Physics of the Impossible:A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel was written by Michio Kaku, a quantum physicist who co-wrote the string field theory (which I had never heard of before reading the back flap.  Luckily you don’t have to know anything about string field theory before reading, although Kaku does explain it some detail in the conclusion of the book.)

I picked this up on a whim (as I do most of my books) but quickly found myself engrossed in the text.  Kaku categorizes various futuristic ideas such as phasers and force fields into Class I, Class II, and Class III Impossibilities.  Here’s a quick rundown of the categories:

Class I Impossibilities are technologies that are impossible today, but that do not violate the known laws of physics.  They are ideas that might be possible to achieve either in this century or the next.

Class II Impossibilities are technologies are so advanced, either they’re completely impossible, or if they are achievable, it won’t happen for a millennia, or even a million years.

Class III Impossibilities are technologies that violate the known laws of physics, and are therefore impossible.  There are (surprisingly) only two ideas in this category, and Kaku says, “If they do turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics.” This is the sort of understatement that scientists like to engage in.

He starts out with the Class I items, and those actually take up a majority of the book.  It was also the most interesting (and understandable) section of the book.  In Class II items, he starts explaining some pretty wild quantum theories that went right over my head.

Luckily, he doesn’t do this the whole way through, or I would have put the book down long before the end.  I have studied science very little, and quantum physics not at all, so the fact that he only lost me a couple of times speaks volumes of his writing style.

The book flows pretty easily from one Class I impossibility to the next, and you feel that by the end, you’ve learned more about where science is at right now than you could have by sitting through 5 years of college lectures.  It’s a book that I found myself discussing with anyone who would sit still long enough (”Did you know that they are working on an invisibility cloak and have already been able to make minuscule items invisible in the red light spectrum?”  Some days I feel sorry for my coworkers…)

Any huge Star Trek or Star Wars fan would thoroughly enjoy this book, since he mentions different episodes/parts of the movies throughout the book.  Although it’s fun to imagine that things like teleporters exist, it’s even more fun - for me - to find out that scientists are actually working on making them into a reality, and X, Y, and Z are the things they are focusing on.

Also, any science geeks would love this book, since it’s easy enough for a regular person to understand, but definitely not dumbed down so much a science nerd couldn’t enjoy it.  Not to mention that his Notes section at the end of the book was quite extensive.

Having said all that, I loved this book, and I am neither a Star Trek, Star Wars, or science geek.  I enjoyed reading it because I love hearing about the latest and greatest that humanity has come up with, and I simply love to learn.  I felt like I really had learned something when I finished this book, instead of just wasting the last 5 hours of my life.

I give Physics of the Impossible 4.5 out of 5 stars.  There was a bit too much over-my-head information to rate it higher than that, but it was still one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a long time.

Now I’m going to have to hunt out some of the other books he’s written.  Beyond Einstein and Hyperspace both sound interesting…

Havs

True Ghost Stories by Hans Holzer was not my favorite ghost story collection, but it was average.  He said at one point in the book that he’d written over 100 books (I checked out his Wikipedia article, and it looks like he’s written exactly 138 books thus far) and that made me wonder just how old he is.  So I looked that up too, and apparently he was born in 1920.  I’m not surprised.  His style of writing is that of an older person, and it was obvious enough that it bugged me throughout the book.  Here’s a quick excerpt as an example:

“This was very necessary, you see, because she had just been through a nervous breakdown due to an unhappy love affair…The conversation at the dinnertable had been about art and poetry, two subjects very dear to Dorothy’s heart…That night she went to bed with anticipatory fears, but nothing happened.” Page 95-95, True Ghost Stories.

Maybe it’s just me, but that narrator voice is very annoying, and after reading 502 pages of stilted phrases, it made me want to poke my eyeball out with a fork. No, I’m not overly dramatic, why do you ask?

As a redeeming quality, there was quite a bit of interesting information in it.  I really don’t read many paranormal books (I read Don’t Call Them Ghosts and another book about ghosts in New England, and that’s been it for me, ever).  So perhaps the information he gives would be review for other people, but to me, it was all new.  He talked about the differences between ghosts, and how sometimes people think they’re experiencing a ghost when in actuality it’s a psychic imprint, and other random information like that I’d never heard.  If those interesting tidbits had been put by themselves into a book, it would have made for an interesting book.  As it was, you had to wade through chapters of poorly told ghost stories to get to them.

Oh, and he also talked some about how he became a Psychic Investigator, which I thought was one of the most interesting parts of the book - I wish I had learned more about that transformation, because he had started out as a pure skeptic.  There was no such thing as ghosts, period.  To go from that to being a leading expert in the world on paranormal activity is quite a jump, and I enjoyed the little bit that he did explain.  Perhaps I need to see if he wrote an autobiography and read that if he has.  Maybe I just picked up the wrong book by him, I don’t know.

Overall, I would say that the book tends to wear on - it’s long, the ghost stories start to run together, and the narrator voice is grating.  If you’re looking for a plethora of ghost stories as inspiration for story or skit that you’re writing, you’ll find all you want here and more.  But it wasn’t a book that would keep you up at night, reading, too scared to go to sleep.  In fact, I had a hard time forcing myself to read it at all.

I give True Ghost Stories 2.75 out of 5 stars.

Havs