Is it really possible to talk with the dead? As much as modern America is familiar with mediums--think bestselling authors John Edwards and Sylvia Browne--this question still generates passionate opinions from believers and skeptics alike. So one can only imagine the stir that the Fox sisters created in 1848 when they claimed to hear a ghost rapping on the wall of their Hydesville, New York rental house bedroom. The sisters soon discovered that the ghost would tap answers to specific questions. Within days neighbors and travelers were showing up at the house, wanting to converse with the dead rapper. The Fox sisters--Maggie and Kate--went onto become a national phenomenon, holding séances and making their livings as celebrity mediums. They were also the leaders of a new movement called the spiritualists. New York-based filmmaker Barbara Weisberg assembled this fascinating and expertly recounted biography. Beyond trying to prove whether the Fox girls were legitimate, Weisberg wrote a study of how two young girls could shape a new spiritual movement in mid-1800s America. "The more I thought about the Fox sisters, the more it seemed to me not only that Kate and Maggie sparked a movement, but that their lives epitomized the conflicts and urges that helped fuel its blaze. The question of the other world aside, the girls' appeal surely stemmed in part from the ways they embodied—and intuited—their culture's anxieties and ambitions." Ironically, in not trying to prove whether these two were frauds, Weisberg has created a more satisfying human story within a rich historical context, not unlike the tactics used for the bestseller Seabiscuit. And likewise, this could and should easily translate into a dynamite major motion picture. --Gail Hudson

From Publishers Weekly
When the Fox family moved to Hydesville, N.Y., in 1848, they were confronted with strange and unexplainable noises coming from their bedroom. After an evening of listening to these raps and knocks on the walls, the Foxes' youngest children, Maggie and Kate, discovered that they had a gift for communicating with the spirits that made the sounds-when one of the girls knocked on the wall, the spirits would knock back. In her engaging study, Weisberg, a former documentary filmmaker, sets the case of the Fox sisters into the context of a 19th-century America that was developing a fascination with the world of spirits and the paranormal. The two Fox sisters began making public appearances in which they would talk to ghosts; along with their older sister, Leah, they eventually developed a traveling psychic show that took them across America and to Europe, leading tens of thousands of Americans to attend seances. While many clerics accused them of working for the devil, they cultivated a huge following, who, Weisberg says, needed to allay the anxieties of the modern age. In 1888, however, Maggie announced that the sisters had been engaged in deceptive practices. Her announcement shook the world of spiritualists. Although Maggie recanted one year later, the question had been raised: do spiritualists really speak to the dead? Weisberg refuses to judge the Fox sisters, saying only that it's plausible that they were deceptive, in this lively tale of a little-known slice of American history. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
The tables started tapping in Hydesville, N.Y., in 1848. The apparent mediums were Maggie and Kate Fox, 14 and 11 respectively, who in March of that year began to "communicate" with supposed spirits that had been knocking on the floor and walls of their house for the past two weeks. Forty years later, the sisters declared it had all been a hoax. In Talking to the Dead, Barbara Weisberg illustrates that this seemingly simple account of fakery and gullibility is in fact mesmerizingly complex. The Fox sisters' story itself has been written about several times; Weisberg's innovation is to examine it as social history, an approach that enriches the familiar story and raises it above the level of simple hoax. In 1848, Edgar Allan Poe had one more year to live; Neptune had recently been discovered; revolution threatened in Europe; and the railroad was still transforming American life. The Civil War was 13 years away, and Weisberg points out that the Fox family (including a brother and another sister) were anti-slavery in their sentiments and counted as close friends the Quaker social radicals Amy and Isaac Post, who ran a station on the Underground Railroad. Modern readers may be surprised to learn how closely spiritualism (as the Fox sisters' practice came to be called) was allied with movements such as abolitionism and women's rights. Yet even into this century, the nutty and the progressive have often shared a bed. The area of New York State around Hydesville was the '60s San Francisco of its day, seething with utopian, socially experimental ways of living and daringly liberal politics. As in the '60s, participation was by no means limited to cranks. Frederick Douglass (on whom Maggie seems to have had a mild crush) attended seances. So did Poe's literary executor, Rufus Griswold, and Horace ("Go West, young man!") Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. It's easy today to sneer at spiritualism, and it was easy for many people then, too. But Weisberg's interest is in those who believed. The 19th century had its share of hellfire Christianity, but it was also when the idea of God as essentially a nice guy rather than a stern judge was beginning to take hold in the middle classes. Spiritualism went one step further: Though the movement sincerely espoused belief in the biblical deity, in practice He tended to slip out of the picture. None of the dead relatives contacted by the bereaved seemed to be in anything like hell -- or heaven, for that matter. They appeared to exist in a friendly, if rather bland, place. Spiritualism had created an afterlife without judgment or salvation or, by extension, God. The 19th century wasn't squeamish about death. There was a lot of it around, mostly among young children (There was almost no family in which at least one child didn't make it to adolescence.) Disease was often virulent. People died at home and were laid out in the parlor. As photography advanced, portraits of the dead in their coffins became a vogue. It was only a step from this homey attitude toward the deceased to attempting to contact them. The era saw many mediums, but the Fox sisters were an uncharacteristically provocative phenomenon. Before performing in public, they were taken into private rooms, stripped and searched -- always by ladies, but the gentlemen waiting outside could visualize what was happening. And sometimes men tested the sisters by holding their ankles or arms. Young and virginal, Kate and Maggie nonetheless appeared on stage, usually the prerogative only of actresses, who were assumed to be little above prostitutes. This good-girl/bad-girl sexual aura seems to have been strong stuff. So, how did the sisters fake it? Throughout their career, some skeptics postulated that Maggie and Kate were doing no more than cracking their unusually flexible joints to provide the coded messages from "beyond." This turned out to be the case. Still, for Weisberg and the reader, the question lingers: What was really going on in the sisters' minds? Were they only pranksters? Forty years is a long time to carry on a joke, even if you have been trapped by it. Con artists? They didn't make much money from their trade. Crazy? Both sisters suffered from terrible headaches and what, from the little evidence we have, might have been a mild manic-depressive syndrome, but they clearly weren't psychotic. At the end, they claimed they'd always been frauds, driven on by their exploitative older sister (and sometime mystic) Leah. Yet there are indications that something more complicated was going on, that at least at times they half-believed in the reality of the spirits whose appearances they were faking. Weisberg leaves that question, and its implications about the complexity of human motive, wisely open. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Few people know the Fox sisters, and those who do probably can't go much beyond the words mediums and frauds. But Weisberg goes way beyond those hazy stereotypes, not only bringing these fascinating young women to life but also portraying the quixotic mid-nineteenth-century era in which spiritualism was allowed to flourish. We are introduced to 11-year-old Kate and 14-year-old Maggie, who first heard the rapping of a dead peddler in their basement and went on to help found a movement that offered people a more benevolent picture of life after death than the then-prevalent Puritan version. Was it more than chance, Weisberg asks, that the area of western New York where the Fox sisters lived was also home to Mormon founder Joseph Smith as well as an active outpost of abolitionism and the burgeoning women's movement? Weisberg does an excellent job of showing how these various branches of an essentially reformist movement (reshaping culture, religion, and society) are intertwined. But always at the heart of the story are these young women (and their older, shrewder sister) and the effect their experiences with the occult were having on them. Were they faking? The book offers hints and clues, but readers must decide for themselves. A revealing look at the history of spiritualism and its place in nineteenth-century culture. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"March 1848. Mysterious knocks are heard in a little house in rural New York, throwing the community into turmoil. Are the children who live there - Kate and Maggie Fox, sisters aged eleven and fourteen - making the raps to trick their parents? Or are the girls mediums for otherworldly messages? From a battery of strange sounds and the excitement they create, modern Spiritualism is born." "Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism follows the remarkable story of the Fox sisters, who were catapulted to fame after word spread that they communicated with spirits. Within a few years, tens of thousands of Americans were flocking to seances. An international movement developed. Yet forty years after those first knocks, the sisters shocked the country by denying that they had ever been in contact with the dead. Shortly after, in another stunning reversal, they changed their story again and reaffirmed their faith in the spirit world. Were the Fox sisters con artists who had taken a childhood prank too far? Or were they really in touch with "voices from beyond"?" In this biography, Barbara Weisberg traces not only the lives of Kate, Maggie, and their family - including the girls' shrewd and charismatic sister, Leah - but also the social, religious, economic, and political forces that helped shape the Spiritualist movement. A vivid, compelling overview of a remarkable period in U.S. history, Talking to the Dead provokes questions about belief systems, the power of celebrity, the wish to reconcile faith and science, and the timeless quest for knowledge about life after death.

FROM THE CRITICS

Lloyd Rose - The Washington Post

In Talking to the Dead, Barbara Weisberg illustrates that this seemingly simple account of fakery and gullibility is in fact mesmerizingly complex. The Fox sisters' story itself has been written about several times; Weisberg's innovation is to examine it as social history, an approach that enriches the familiar story and raises it above the level of simple hoax.

Publishers Weekly

When the Fox family moved to Hydesville, N.Y., in 1848, they were confronted with strange and unexplainable noises coming from their bedroom. After an evening of listening to these raps and knocks on the walls, the Foxes' youngest children, Maggie and Kate, discovered that they had a gift for communicating with the spirits that made the sounds-when one of the girls knocked on the wall, the spirits would knock back. In her engaging study, Weisberg, a former documentary filmmaker, sets the case of the Fox sisters into the context of a 19th-century America that was developing a fascination with the world of spirits and the paranormal. The two Fox sisters began making public appearances in which they would talk to ghosts; along with their older sister, Leah, they eventually developed a traveling psychic show that took them across America and to Europe, leading tens of thousands of Americans to attend s ances. While many clerics accused them of working for the devil, they cultivated a huge following, who, Weisberg says, needed to allay the anxieties of the modern age. In 1888, however, Maggie announced that the sisters had been engaged in deceptive practices. Her announcement shook the world of spiritualists. Although Maggie recanted one year later, the question had been raised: do spiritualists really speak to the dead? Weisberg refuses to judge the Fox sisters, saying only that it's plausible that they were deceptive, in this lively tale of a little-known slice of American history. Agent, Mel Berger. (On sale Apr. 13) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In 1848 two adolescent sisters in New York State convinced friends and neighbors that the spirit of a murdered peddler was communicating with them through a series of audible raps or knocks. That they were able to do so reveals as much about the American psyche at mid-19th century as it does about the remarkable sisters, Catherine and Margaret Fox. The "Rochester rappings" precipitated a national furor over Spiritualism, a religious and cultural phenomenon whose followers believed spirit communication was based in scientific principles similar to those underlying magnetism and electricity. Author and documentary filmmaker Weisberg captures the essence of that era in this gracefully written scholarly biography tracing the Fox sisters' private lives and public careers as mediums. One of the few books devoted to the sisters, it complements more definitive studies of Spiritualism, such as Ann Braude's 1989 Radical Spirits and R. Laurence Moore's 1977 In Search of White Crows. Appropriate for general readers and undergraduate students interested in 19th-century religion, culture, or women's history.-Linda V. Carlisle, Southern Illinois Univ., Edwardsville Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews