Quick, fun read. Great for kids who like mysterious happenings but scare easily. ( )

Quick, fun read. Great for kids who like mysterious happenings but scare easily. ( )

Daniel Cohen is still probably my favorite writer on the paranormal. He manages to entertainingly cover all the basics of a "mystery", then point out the ways it's probably not a mystery, and then end on a note of "it's probably perfectly mundane, but either way it's still a good story." Which probably annoys hardcore skeptics as much as it annoys believers, but it fits just right with my own reasons for reading this stuff.

Riddle of the Stones is a short, ya-targeted overview of some of the standard "UNEXPLAINED", from King Arthur to the Mary Celeste. Doesn't go in-depth, yet still has enough to get you yelling at your screen at the next History Channel special.

All the ground it covers is topics that are also in his Encyclopedia of the Strange, which I practically memorized as a youngling, and mostly duplicates the info (with a few updates). ( )

A fun starting point for anyone interested in unsolved mysteries. They are all pretty much well-known, and although brief, the book gives a fairly rounded summary.

The topics covered are: The Tunguska explosion, the Mary Celeste, UFOs, alien abductions, Stonehenge, Atlantis, Kaspar Hauser, the Bermuda Triangle, the Oak Island mystery, King Arthur, spontaneous human combustion, and crop circles. ( )

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