Name: altlovesbooks's review of The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight
Item: The Premonitions Bureau
Rating: 2
Author: altlovesbooks

Sam Knight

From a rising star New Yorker staff writer, the incredible and gripping true story of John Barker, a psychiatrist who investigated the power of premonitions--and came to believe he himself was destined for an early death On the morning of October 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher in suburban London, awoke choking and gasping, convinced disaster was about to strike. An hour later, a mountain of rubble containing waste from a coal mine collapsed above the village of Aberfan, swamping buildings and killing 144 people, many of them children. Among the doctors and emergency workers who arrived on the scene was John Barker, a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital, in Shrewsbury. At Aberfan, Barker became convinced there had been supernatural warning signs of the disaster, and decided to establish a "premonitions bureau," in conjunction with the Evening Standard newspaper, to collect dreams and forebodings from the British public, in the hope of preventing future calamities. One of the first people to share her premonition was Middleton, who like many other seemingly normal people, would contribute hundreds of visions to Barker's research in the years to come, some of them unnervingly accurate. As Barker's work plunged him deeper and deeper into the world of the occult and supernatural, his reputation with his colleagues suffered badly. But, in the face of professional humiliation, Barker only became more and more certain that premonitions were real and important, ultimately realizing with terrible certainty that catastrophe had been prophesied in his own life. In Knight's crystalline telling, this astonishing story, with its transfixing conclusion, comes to encompass the secrets of the world. Of course, we all know premonitions are impossible--and yet they come true all the time. You think of your mother, a moment later she calls. Our lives are full of collisions and coincidence: the question is how we interpret the fall of chance and make meaningful stories about the progress of our lives. As Knight writes, "How we distinguish the chances that signify and the ones that do not, and the decisions that we make in our lives as a result, is the kind of question that turns in on itself and might be impossible for us, as individuals, to answer. We cannot stand outside our own lives. We would not want to." John Barker found that he could not leave chance alone.

A True Account of Death Foretold

The Premonitions Bureau

altlovesbooks

For an interesting topic this was incredibly dry. I'd have preferred more info on the workings of the Bureau, rather than retelling of various disasters

Kate Standing 

You know, for a book about premonitions and foretelling disaster, this was pretty boring. 

Back in 1966, there was a major industrial accident in Aberfan, Wales. Several tons of coal mining debris collapsed, slid down the mountain it was perched at the edge of, and buried a school. Several people all around the world experienced premonitions of the event, in the form of dreams of black or a choking feeling. John Baker, a psychiatrist, collected all this information, and became convinced of the idea that people can and do experience predictive moments. That future disasters could be staved off if only he could harness the power of these predictions. Thus, the Premonitions Bureau was established.

If the book had actually been about this Premonitions Bureau, maybe it would've been more coherent and interesting to me. Unfortunately I think this book suffers from a compelling idea without a lot of information behind it. NPR's review of the book says that this book was written based on an article in The New Yorker from 2019 about John Baker (can be found here), and honestly after skimming the article, there isn't much else about the Bureau that wasn't included in the article.

What can be found in the book is a lot of meticulously researched ideas and examples of premonition in human history. Lots of weird coincidental events, people dreaming of disasters, visions of something happening, that actually come true. None of them are related to one another and there's barely a mention of the Premonitions Bureau throughout, but mildly interesting on their own nonetheless.

Ultimately this was a miss for me, though. It wasn't cohesive, I couldn't really tell why I was reading each event or how it related to the book until quite a bit in, and honestly it was dry as dust throughout. I thought the most interesting part of the book was learning about the mining disaster up front, honestly.

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The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight

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The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight