The Truth About Medium: Extraordinary Experiments with the real Allison DuBois of NBC's Medium and other Remarkable Psychics

Every Monday night millions of Americans tune into Medium, NBC's new hit drama featuring Allison DuBois, an ordinary woman who helps police solve baffling crimes through her ability to communicate with the dead. What most don't know is that this fictional character is based on a true-life medium named Allison DuBois, who is a consultant to the show. For the past four years, DuBois has been the subject of rigorous scientific experiments conducted at the University of Arizona by Harvard-trained psychologist Gary Schwartz. The Truth about Medium chronicles many of those experiments as well as the real-life cases Allison has worked on and reveals hard laboratory evidence that psychic ability and mediumship are real.

Adult/High School–For 10 years, Schwartz has been running experiments regarding people who claim to talk to and/or see the dead. One of the most famous of these, Allison DuBois, was one of his research subjects. As a result of public interest generated by the show, the author, a psychology professor, saw the need to share the results of his research, hence his book. Truth and DuBois own book, Dont Kiss Them Good-bye (S & S, 2005), reinforce one another. Kiss will change many skeptics to believers. Schwartzs book, on the other hand, may cause believers to feel skeptical unless they read the whole thing. Schwartz seems unwilling to completely believe the results of his own double- and triple-blind experiments. While he presents the evidence (some of which involves the work of DuBois), he sometimes hedges his bets, using such words as apparently to qualify the actuality of his researcher/mediums connections with the dead. Schwartz writes in a popular style, readily accessible to teens, and he raises some fascinating questions not addressed by the earlier book.–Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, VA
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