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Chambers Dictionary Of The Unexplained
01/11/2007 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 
pub: Chambers Harrap. 760 page illustrated hardback. Price: £35.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-550-10215-7. Buy Chambers Dictionary Of The Unexplained in the USA - or Buy Chambers Dictionary Of The Unexplained in the UK  check out websites: www.chambers.co.uk and www.chambersunexplained.co.uk or www.chambersunexplained.com
Just between ourselves, the publicist who sent me this books didn't actually believe I would sit down and read a dictionary. Flicking the pages, this book is more like a mini-encyclopaedia with entries anything from half a column to two or more pages. Each topic has a brief definition before going into more depth explaining the origin of the word before digging into the history of the subject. Oddly enough, the twenty-five panel entries by specialists lack the brief definition which considering they are extractions from the main pages makes little sense omitting. Reading it as a straight-forward book presented no more problem than spacing out the reading to absorb the material.
The title of this book should tell you something about the contests. It is an exploration of all the unexplained subjects from unknown animals to witchcraft to UFOs to the Kabbalah with loads of mini-biographies. I'm a bit puzzled why the missing Lord Lucan was included and not Jack the Ripper but on the whole if you want a grounding on all of these subjects in a handy reference book then this is more than adequate.
It's a bit difficult to pick out bits to atypify the book overall. It is interesting that there are so many mentions of Science Fiction. This isn't done in a bad way just how the influence it has affected the perception of people. Probably the best example if Spielberg's film 'Close Encounters Of The Third Kind' which gets its own entry and people started seeing the mothership with their UFO sightings. Clearly an indication that for some people, expectation can play tricks with the eyes.
One of the things I do with such books as this is to look over the various subjects and look for possible links together. I mean take the Yeti, Sasquatch and others named in the book. The similarities across the continents are more than co-incidental to think they are pure invention. The same might be said of the various creatures in various lakes across the world. If, as my review of 'The Loch Ness Mystery Solved' book indicated the same criteria could be applied to these other locations, feasibility to food available, etc could determine if there was anything to investigate. It's interesting that the UFO experts noted in this book are removing so many of the misinterpretations and hoaxes so they can look more closely at what is left and taking a more scientific approach. Turning my objective eye on the material here, I'm getting strong indications that although some thing is going on, it is also showing how humans can be swept along and associating what they see with expected labels. Seeing is no longer believing but needs a level of objectivity to understand what is being seen and possible influences. That might explain why so many observers are described as ordinary people and nary an SF fan amongst them. If nothing else, in the long run it might also explain more about us than the world about us. Man is very much a creature of belief and when it needs something to pique the collective imagination, something is there to fulfil it.
Is there anything about this book I didn't like? Some of it purely from an editorial perspective. Although I can appreciate needed to be spread out, it did seem a little crazy to have various numbers topics spread through the book when it might have been easier to deal with them collectively. The same could be said for the various tarot card suites. A larger collected entry would have given a better picture. Any space saved could have been used for more photographs. There's a lot of photos in this book as well. Some I've seen before. A few I hadn't.
If you want to gen up on your knowledge of anything unexplained as a ready reference then this book should cover your needs.
Before you ask, it took me four weeks to read this book. Nothing unexplained just reading thirty pages a day.
GF Willmetts
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