Lo! (An Ace book)

by Charles Fort

Book Overview

Lo Was Charles Fort's third book. In it Fort examines a multitude of scientific anomalies. Fort is widely credited to have coined the now-popular term teleportation in this book, and here he ties his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0007EXSCQ
• Release Date: January 1941
• Publisher: Ace Books
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Stranded on an island, all alone? LO! will save you!

Well I ran into another Ace classic pulp edition of LO! and found it not only worth a third read (that in itself says it all) but a book profoundly liberating. LO! takes on Einstein by detailing peer-reviewed, academic, empirical studies which contradicted Einstein's theory. Back when Fort wrote LO! such "walking the plank" manuevers by any writer would be considered unfortunate at best. Today though, with the upsurge of Modified Newtonian Dyanamics (MOND) to account for the missing 96% of the universe (of whatever) Charles Fort has finally come into his own. The man was a genius because he runs the gamut of possible explanations for his "damned facts" but does so in a writing style that competes with Beckett or Joyce. Those damned teleporting whirlwinds! With quantum electronics repeatedly verifying faster-than-light signals (not just "after the fact" randomized superliminal information that was correlated) Fort's teleporting whirlwinds are now in the lab! If anything, for those who find Fort's conjectures hard to digest, he at least recreates the grand wonder of discovery, showing how essentially humans are puny little nodes in a vast network of self-organizing complexity. But then that's what the top science research states as well, although most of the "real" scientists are psychologically not able to handle the new power laws of network theory. That's why LO! should be required reading for all "serious" scientists. Why limit ourselves?

Lo!

It seems that many people's complaints about this book is that Mr. Fort never explains his exact view. However, this is what is so wonderful; he doesn't crowd out your own thoughts with his own dogmatic beliefs. He leaves room for you to draw your own conclusions. I'm 12 and I understand this book perfectly. Maybe it is that you need to open your mind to accept the unexplained, to have imagination. "We will pick up an existence by its frogs."

great book

Being an avid reader of John Keel,Ivan Sanderson,Colin Wilson,etc.for the last 30 years I only recently began reading Mr.Fort himself.My first book that I read by him "the book of the damned" was interesting but quite disappointing when compared to people like Keel and such.However,"Lo!" on the other hand is just what I was looking for.A vast collection of Forteana.Weird rains,vampire attacks,ghosts,sea monsters and other creatures,disappearances,ufos-whatever you want,it's in there.This is a book that should keep you focused for hours on end as it is great reading.

Interesting, perhaps a little dense.

Charles Fort is considered the venerable grandfather of anomalistic literature, and with good reason - his works are a fantastical Sears-Roebuck of frogs falling from the sky, rocks thrown by invisible hands, spontaneous human combustion, and people who disappear and reappear at random. If you're going to be in the field at all, you should read your Fort.Of course, that's not to say that he's perfect. Fort's tongue-in-cheek message about science and the nature of reality is easy to misunderstand, and he doesn't do anything to help the situation with a dense, run-on prone style of prose. For the researcher, his occasional lack of documentation is also frustrating. All in all, though, this is definitely a book worth checking out if you can find it.