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Michael L Schmicker A long-time admirer of Catcher in the Rye

Michael L Schmicker

Biography

Michael Schmicker is a veteran business journalist, member of the Society for Scientific Exploration, member of the Board of Advisors for the Rhine Research Center, and nationally-known writer on scientific anomalies. His latest book is The Gift, ESP: The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People (St. Martin's Press 2005 (USA); Rider/Random House 2006 (UK). Michael has been a featured guest on national radio talk shows, including Coast to Coast AM with both George Noory and Art Bell; The Jeff Rense Program; the X-Zone (Canada) and Uri Geller's Parascience and Beyond. (England). He created Yahoo Internet Life magazine's guide to the best websites dedicated to "Paranormal Phenomena," is a contributer to the web/journal Anomalist, and reviews books for the Journal of Scientific Exploration. His interest in investigating the paranormal began as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand where he first encountered a non-Western culture and people who readily accept the reality of a world beyond the five senses, sparking a lifelong curiosity about scientific anomalies unexplainable by current science.

He began his writing career as a crime court reporter for a suburban Dow-Jones/Ottaway newspaper in Connecticut, and later worked as a freelance reporter in Southeast Asia for the Bangkok Post and Bangkok World during the Vietnam War. He is currently banned from Thailand for the rare crime of lese-majeste, insulting a monarch, following an article he wrote for the Asian Wall Street Journal in December 1982 questioning the suitability of the Crown Prince to suceed King Bumibhol, and speculating on the future of the Thai monarchy should Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn ascend to the throne. The Asian Wall Street Journal was also banned from distribution in Thailand, but it has since been lifted. In 2006, Yale University Press published The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's King Bumibol Adulyadej, an unauthorized biography by journalist Paul Handley. In it, Handley recapped the author's arguments and emailed the author, "I always admired your piece." Handly's book is also banned in Thailand.

Upcoming Works

  • One of my recent Red Room blogs ("Draft Bait (9) Hemingway, Maugham and Me") dealing with my Peace Corps experience in Thailand during the Vietnam War is scheduled for publication in the anthology FIRST OF THE YEAR 2009, at the end of October. Fellow Red Room writer Bob Levin made the introduction to the anthology editor; Bob will also have a piece in the book.

    Here's the pre-publication blurb for the anthology (my contribution is the mentioned "edgy sojourn" in Thailand):
    "This is the second volume in the 'First of the Year Series'. Contributors like Armond White, Philip Levine, Donna Gaines, Lawrence Goodwyn, Irving Louis Horowitz, Charles O'Brien, Fredric Smoler, Paul Berman, and Amiri Baraka are back (and blazing). And there are important new voices in the First mix, such as Vincent Harding, Roxane Johnson, and Bob Levin. If there is a leitmotif to this edition, it is the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African-American president. First aims to be up to the minute of this moment. As Benj DeMott notes 'a glance at this volume confirms the margin is still the center for us'. And that margin stretches from Harlem to the world. There are tales of edgy sojourns in Afghanistan, Thailand, and South Africa. The volume also has a Question & Answer with Ousmane Sembene, who taught Africans to resist 'elements of received culture - those fixed rules and values which nobody but those on the margins dare to question'. A second interview with Adam Hochschild celebrates the Englishman who invented abolition, and an African-American original who coined the phrase 'crimes against humanity'. The volume includes a protest against the Israeli war machine by Uri Avnery who has long been a creative outsider in his own society. It makes the case that American ideologues (on both extremes) keep getting the Middle East wrong because they cannot grasp the complexities of any country, including their own. First of the Year's minority angles of vision will help readers see with new eyes. It will help their hearing too. The volume has plenty of music writing marked by loving attention to details of pop performances. In short, this collection reflects its editor; direct, unafraid, urban, and entirely contemporary."

    I recently finished researching a biography of Eusapia Palladino and have now started the hard part -- writing it.

Relationship

  • Married 34 years

Family

  • one son (editorial assistant at Hearst Publications, NYC)

Causes I Support

Agents

  • Sobel-Weber Associates, New York

Contact Agents

  • Nat Sobel/Adia Wright
    Sobel-Weber Associates
    146 East 19th St.
    New York, NY 10003-2404
    212-420-8585

Publishers

  • St. Martin's Press ("The Gift")
    Random House/Rider ("The Gift" UK edition)
    Anomalist Books ("The Universe Wants to Play")
    Watermark Publishing ("Old Mac-Donald-San's Farm")
    Transaction Publishers ("First of the Year 2009")
    iUniverse Publishing ("Best Evidence")

Contact Publishers

  • For St. Martin's Press: fax (212-674-6132)
    For Anomalist Books: Patrick Huyghe at: huyghe@anomalist.com
    For Watermark Publishing: George Engebretson at george@bookshawaii.net
    For iuniverse: Rhonda Winchell 402-323-7800 x207

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