NONFICTION - Sept. 18, 1994

KOOKS: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief by Donna Kossy. (Feral House: $16.95 paper; 256 pp.) Though the word cockoo cuckoo , as applied to people goes back to 1581 (“esp. in reference to the bird’s monotonous call, or its habit of laying its eggs in the nests of other birds”--OED), the diminutive kook apparently only surfaced in the late beatnik era: “A kook, daddy-o, is a screwball who is ‘gone’ father than most.” When the unique and invaluable Kooks magazine ceased publication after only eight issues, the study and connoisseurship of aberrant thinking was at a loss. For two years Kooks editor, Donna Kossy, had reproduced many original documents and tracts and initiated groundbreaking research into numerous murky byways of unconscious reality. Now she has emerged with a rich compendium of looniness, a guide, as the subtitle has it, to “the utter limits of human belief.” Herein are such things as the voluntary human extinction movement, the history of anti-gravity research, Arnold Ehret’s mucus-less diet, a disquisition on men having babies, flat earthers (of course), dinosaurs as satanic creations, psychoosmologists, self-trepanation, Christian technocracy, the World Ionization Institute, a sampling from MIT’s little-known Archive of Useless Research.

“Kooks,” while highly entertaining to anyone with a penchant for the bizarre and outlandish, has the deeper motivation of limning the nature of human belief by examining some of its less explicable passions. Kossy’s respect for her materials is admirable. She quotes liberally and only gently and occasionally comments, making this a far more congenial and useful work of reference than the only remotely comparable volume--Mackay’s 1841 “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Kossy realizes, after all, that “potentially we are all kooks.”