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THE MAN WHO COULD FLY: ST. JOSEPH OF COPERTINO AND THE MYSTERY OF LEVITATION by Michael Grosso. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Pp. xi + 251. $38.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-1-4422-5672-9.
In this effort, Michael Grosso has written an engaging, entertaining, and interesting book about not only the life story of one of the most fascinating Catholic saints, St. Joseph of Copertino, but about how we might account for the alleged levitations for which he is best known as genuine physical phenomena. Grosso, for his part, opens the text claiming that "[t]his book is about the possibility of transcendence" (p. 1), but, despite his dedication of the book to Pope Francis, he eschews religious interpretations in favor of a range of familiar paranormal hypotheses. The book is about wonderment and belief, to be certain, most explicitly that of Joseph and his contemporaries, but also about the author's own perspective on the phenomena and their possibility.
I want to begin my review by stating unequivocally that I enjoyed reading this book, which I see divided into two distinct sets of material. On one hand, the book relates the life story of Joseph in a manner that is both highly informative and engaging. It is in this area that the book achieves its greatest success and would be a valuable resource for any reader interested in an accessible hagiography of this most intriguing of saints. The other material Grosso presents can be summarized as an attempt to defend the purported levitational phenomena as genuine and then to offer a potential explanation for how these miracles might be explained. Unfortunately, the arguments presented therein are altogether weak, relying more on a sense of wonderment than on a logic compelling enough to convince the skeptic.
The book itself is divided into three parts: Part I: The Man and His Marvels; Part II: Steps Toward Understanding; and Part III: Concluding Reflections. It is in the first part that the life story of Joseph largely appears, most of it contained within the first chapter. It is important to note that Grosso returns to details of the story of Joseph's life and miracles throughout the book, such that one interested only in the hagiographic elements will still benefit from reading the book...