Rating: 
Summary: I want to go to Lily Dale!
Review: What a magical, enchanting place. The people that live there are so lucky. It seems almost like a utopia of sorts.Or as much of a utopia as one could come close to in a flawed world.
I enjoyed Ms. Wickers writing style.It was honest and self reflecting and descriptive.
She was also really objective about the subject manner which I know all cynical minded people would appreciate.
I think the thing that impressed me the most was that by the end of the book the author came out changed by the experience.
She didn't become a full fledged believer in Spiritualism but she emerged from this experience tangibly changed.A book in which an author was changed by writing it is one worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Mediums at large in Lily Dale
Review: "Lily Dale" was written by a journalist who was for many years the Religion reporter for the "Dallas Morning News." It concerns her experiences in Lily Dale, New York, one of several small towns founded by the Spiritualist community in the 19th century. Today, Lily Dale continues to be a magnet for mediums, those who consult them, and a wide range of New Age fellow travelers. Wicker gives a brief history of the town, and provdes a number of historic pictures, but most of the book concentrates on the modern community. During the summer "camp season," it becomes a haven for spiritual seekers, and its population swells with tourists, curiosity seekers, and those moved by belief or emotional need to contact their dead loved ones. Wicker's style is personal and anecdotal. She tells the stories of a number of people, both year long residents and summer visitors, many of whom are in genuine emotional pain. She includes her own encounters and experiences as part of the mix. Her narrative is a little disorganized, which makes it difficult sometimes to follow. However, through Wicker's somewhat skeptical eyes, Lily Dale emerges as a quirky place populated by--at best--gifted and dedicated psychics and--at worst--well-meaning but deluded spiritual seekers. Much of the interest of the book lies in Wicker's own response to the people she encounters and what she experiences. She is genuinely interested in discovering the truth of Lily Dale. Are the mediums really communicating with the dead? Are they truly psychic or are their readings just educated guesses and wishful thinking? Wicker wrestles with this question, sometimes believing, sometimes not. In the end, I think she gets it just right, acknowledging many misses, the occasional hits, and the ambiguous areas in between. Ultimately, she concludes, it's not so much the actual truth of what the mediums say that matters, but the potential for spiritual growth that can be found at the heart of this mystery.
Rating:
Summary: Mediums at large in Lily Dale
Review: "Lily Dale" was written by a journalist who was for many years the Religion reporter for the "Dallas Morning News." It concerns her experiences in Lily Dale, New York, one of several small towns founded by the Spiritualist community in the 19th century. Today, Lily Dale continues to be a magnet for mediums, those who consult them, and a wide range of New Age fellow travelers. Wicker gives a brief history of the town, and provdes a number of historic pictures, but most of the book concentrates on the modern community. During the summer "camp season," it becomes a haven for spiritual seekers, and its population swells with tourists, curiosity seekers, and those moved by belief or emotional need to contact their dead loved ones. Wicker's style is personal and anecdotal. She tells the stories of a number of people, both year long residents and summer visitors, many of whom are in genuine emotional pain. She includes her own encounters and experiences as part of the mix. Her narrative is a little disorganized, which makes it difficult sometimes to follow. However, through Wicker's somewhat skeptical eyes, Lily Dale emerges as a quirky place populated by--at best--gifted and dedicated psychics and--at worst--well-meaning but deluded spiritual seekers. Much of the interest of the book lies in Wicker's own response to the people she encounters and what she experiences. She is genuinely interested in discovering the truth of Lily Dale. Are the mediums really communicating with the dead? Are they truly psychic or are their readings just educated guesses and wishful thinking? Wicker wrestles with this question, sometimes believing, sometimes not. In the end, I think she gets it just right, acknowledging many misses, the occasional hits, and the ambiguous areas in between. Ultimately, she concludes, it's not so much the actual truth of what the mediums say that matters, but the potential for spiritual growth that can be found at the heart of this mystery.
Rating:
Summary: Gimme that Old Time New Age religion
Review: (***1/2)
Born in rural New York in 1848, Spiritualism is one of the newer world religions. It attracted millions of adherents for awhile, but first Harry Houdini devoted himself to debunking mediums and replicating their "manifestations" on the cheap, and then the surviving founder confessed in her old age that the original raps and tipped tables were simple tricks that she and her sister had concocted to give their mother a little scare. And the Zeitgeist just changed; what had once appealed to leading intellectuals like Emerson and Susan B. Anthony began to feel like lowbrow credulity to younger lights. So spiritualism survives only spottily. But in one town, Lily Dale, not far from its Empire State birthplace, its whole way of life continues as a kind of living fossil, a tribute to the determination of human beings to go on believing. In this case, to go on believing that countless spirits of the dead hover around us, eager to communicate, even if the message is usually trivial or vapid or vague; eager to wobble the furniture and make banging noises on cue. Christine Wicker, a longtime religion correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, made the trek northeast to try to learn how people come to embrace beliefs that seem not merely absurd but downright out of fashion. To her considerable credit, Wicker really wants to understand the residents of Lily Dale, rather than to pass judgment on them. She wants to discover what mediumship feels like to the medium; why people find a deep emotional connection to "messages" from departed loved ones that on paper look pointless or suspiciously generic. By the time she's through, Wicker accomplishes those modest goals. She also bumps up repeatedly both against things she can't explain, and things she can explain all too easily. The mystery and the chicanery almost seem to cancel each other out - but they can't cancel out the unique atmosphere of the town: foggy but warm, Victorian but never prissy, and always crackling with expectation. As a primer of spiritualist doctrine, the book doesn't amount to much. The residents seem to share a common set of practices more than an articulated common set of beliefs, anyway. As a tool for settling the truth value of spiritualism's claims, it amounts to even less. But the author never intended her book to serve those purposes. It does lay out some intriguing historic vignettes. The main focus is on the present day, on the individual mediums the author meets, their personalities, personal histories, the stories they like to tell and the stories they like to tell on each other, and the happy contrivances by which the small society they've built together rattles along. The accent is more on their humanity than on their eccentricity. Before you're through, you get to feel that this is a place and a community you know pretty well. If that's what you come to the book expecting, you will be amply rewarded. I found Ms. Wicker a little too ready for my taste to accord the benefit of the doubt, but a good balance between open mindedness and skepticism isn't easy to strike. Overall she's hit near the mark. This is in part a story about her own spiritual travels, so it would have been pointless to assume an air of cool objectivity. Besides, she's scrupulous about reporting her own experiences and observations separately from her attempts to interpret them. Clearly, the Dallas Morning News has lucked into a professional, and I'm happy they've shared her talents with the rest of us.
Rating:
Summary: more history would have been nice, and less present tedium
Review: A peculiar nonfiction romp through the smallish burg of Lily Dale--early haven for the Spiritualist movement during America's Victorian heyday. The author spent a couple of summers hanging 'round the town, taking courses on paranormal communication, learning local history, and chatting up the mediums. I was more intrigued by the historical aspects of this book than the modern aspects of daily life in Lily Dale, because at present it sounds like a perfectly-pleasant-yet-dull place where fat and happy middle-aged women go to sit in circles and gossip. But if you go back a century, Lily Dale was a backdoor to the feminist/suffragette movement and a safety zone where women acquired and wielded an authority and autonomy that mainstream society denied them. The author is carefully skeptical (or cautiously open-minded, however you prefer to view her), and she (kindly yet somewhat condescendingly) describes how Lily Dale residents freely acknowledge the long and illustrious history of hoaxes, but maintain their beliefs nonetheless. All in all, an intriguing study--even though it fails to draw any hard conclusions or make any firm statements of fact. I understand the author's reluctance to come down on one side of the fence or the other ... but it seems unfair--both to her subjects and to her audience. Instead of announcing, "this is fraud!" or "this is truth!" she winds up with a tepid, watered-down chant of "I want to believe" and leaves it at that.
Rating: 
Summary: Lily Dale Triangle survivor
Review: As I read Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead, I was quite surprised to see how many areas of the book relate to my own experiences. I attended college in Clarion, Pennsylvania (mentioned several times in story-line), I briefly took class from a retired professor at Clarion University mentioned in the story, and I have personally visited Lily Dale (with my grieving mother who had just lost our grandmother). Connecting Clarion, Lily Dale and Erie, Pennsylvania (my hometown) with lines on a map creates a triangle. Wow! Why might these seemingly unrelated events pertain to a book review? Well, to start with, Clarion County Pennsylvania is made out to be a knuckle-dragging, flannel-encased, male citadel by one of the author's anecdotes. This I have to disagree with strongly. The retired philosophy professor is made out to be some sort of divinely wise deity walking among mortals. Truth be told, I dropped his Intro to Philosophy course after a few classes as I felt he was too rigid in his instruction. Finally, my own Lily Dale experience turned me off due to the emotional flea market atmosphere that seemed to find the souls most in search of a spiritual bargain. My mother was obviously grieving so "miraculously" she was called upon by a "medium" during a public meeting and told my grandmother's spirit was next to her in Lily Dale. This from an open-minded researcher of the unexplained. Ms. Wicker is an enthusiastic author who holds the distinction of actually writing the only book devoted to Lily Dale, after generations of doors being closed to journalists. The author does a credible job of keeping the reader's interest in what she is saying, but so many names are used that the death is in the detail. The guide to characters does appear at the end so the detail can be overcome. This writing style does detract. however. The bottom line of Lily Dale as an American phenomena is worth acknowledging. Looking for the instant fix or cure for what ails you by listening to Spiritualist mediums is not acknowledgeable. Wicker walks the line of a non-story to some and the most fascinating place in America to others. I survived my literary visit to Lily Dale by keeping my feet on the ground the whole time I read it. A true believer may not need the answers I was looking for, but then, who would read this book otherwise? - Charles J. Kader
Librarian
Rating: 
Summary: The words of a skeptic made me a believer
Review: Back when I was a Freshman at Fredonia State my mother and I spent one Parents' Weekend roaming the roads of the area for inetersting things to see. We ventured out to Llly Dale one Saturday fall afternoon. We drove around the desolate little roads and checked out the gift shop. My mom was completely sppoked by the amount of stray cats lurking around, so we hopped in the car and left. Several weeks ago I noticed this book at a store and had to buy it out of nostalgia. Anyone at Fredonia State had surely heard their fair share of Lilly Dale stories. I never believed any of them. I chalked it all up to pure circumstance and chance. Christine Wicker, however, helped me see the purpose and truth in opening yourself up to such things. I immediately related to her sharp sarcasm and quick wit. One night I had to jump out of bed and run to my desk to get a pen so that I could underline! If you're looking for fairies and angels floating, go get another book. If you're in search of truth, wisdom, grace, and spiritual growth, buy this one!. Wicker pulls no punches. She slams the reader hard in the face with solid research and historical facts, then questions those same supposed facts with stories that would make the worst cynic (me, in this case) stop and wonder.
Rating:
Summary: Lily Dale by Christine Wicker 2003
Review: Bravo! Ms. Wicker has written a long over-due book about the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, NY. I found it to be well researched and colorful. The book is thought provoking as she describes her experiences and those of others she met in Lily Dale. I found it frequently humorous and at times a bit offensive as she decribes the people she encountered in Lily Dale. There is a sadness too, which is to be expected when discussing physical loss of loved ones. The book opens your mind and your heart again and again. Recognizing each of us is on a spiritual journey, I appreciate her efforts to be objective and present all avenues of possible conclusions for the reader. Read it and draw your own! Better yet spend some of your summer in Lily Dale and find out for yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting story but hard to follow...
Review: Christine Wicker has written an objective book about the unusual community of Lily Dale. I am interested in all things supernatural, paranormal and spiritual but I really struggled to finish this book. While the material is fascinating it is poorly organized. Stories start in one chapter and pick up and finish in chapters much later in the book. There are too many people covered and keeping them straight is difficult. Overall, I'm glad I stayed with the book to the finish but I feel it could have been a much better book with a good editor and some organization.
Rating:
Summary: This is not the Lilydale I know and love.
Review: Christine Wicker missed the opportunity of a lifetime when she was given the honor of writing about Lilydale. This community is over 120 years old and all she can do is put down every idea, word and person she encounters. She provides no background on how Lilydale was ever started, continued to thrive or even does so today. The book is very unbalanced and hard to follow. She doesn't seem to understand the messages of love often given but instead seems to think the winning lottery numbers would be more appreciated.Lilydale has never let reporters inside. They surely must regret their decision. I'm throwing my copy in the fireplace.
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