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Jupiter, Nostradamus, Fatima and You
Steven J. Speare
Avon Books, London. October 1998. ISBN 1-86033-552-7
188 pp, pb, £7.95
PROFILE : STEVEN J SPEARE
Born in 1925 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the author was raised in the depths of the
great American depression. By the age of 14 he had left home and was living
in a bunk house and working on a ranch in Northern California. At the age of 16 and
after hearing Roosevelt's Destiny address repeated after Pearl Harbour -
"Some generations of Americans have been given too much and some generations of
Americans have been given too little but this generation has a rendezvous with
destiny" - the young Steven Speare joined the US Marine Corps
To the background of Miller, Goodman, Dorsey, and the sound of incoming mail, his
assault platoon lived out the Grand Adventure of the age and participated in some of
the most fierce battles of the Pacific War. Battles which culminated in:
Death Island, the Gibraltar and graveyard of the Pacific, Iwo Jima, where
Marine divisions took more casualties on D-Day than did all the US Army troops
landing in Normandy on D-Day June 6th.
Now unable to settle, unable to sit at the feet of higher learning and accept philosophy
from those who hadn't shared his images, he drifted.
From Sacramento to Los Angeles, to Reno, then the city by the Golden Gate,
San Francisco, where he settled. Now in discovery he read the classics, viewed the
galleries and theatres, then ventured into painting and writing ... but waiting in the
wings was Vietnam. He viewed Vietnam as tragic proof of the failure of America's
mass educational system, i.e. generations of American students taught what to think
not how to think. Outraged at the napalming of Vietnamese peasants for the
greater glory of the United States and as a tax paying citizen outraged that atrocity
was perpetrated in his name, he once again left home.
With his British-born wife, he moved to a small country hotel overlooking a Castle in
the south of England. Again, the course of his life would change. Devon's lanes
are narrow with wider passing areas called lay-bys. Following cars through the lane
one Sunday afternoon, he was to witness an act as selfless as any he had seen in the
war.
In the lay-by with her paws stretched before her lay a beautiful adult cat, though
skimmed by cars she lay unmoving as a Sphinx. Investigating, he discovered she was
out of milk with three tiny starving kittens waiting in the hedgerow. Only
months after the rescue the little heroine was dying of an irreversible illness.
In desperation and as a last resort she was taken to a famous British Spiritualist
healer. The resultant healing, confounding and mysterious, would become the catalyst
that would eventually lead to the burden of research and the ultimate writing of this
book.
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