Lamont Wood’s Out of Place in Time and Space

Lamont Wood, a journalist and freelance writer presents “inventions, beliefs, and artistic anomalies that were impossibly ahead of their time” as the cover of his new book indicates.

The litany of “anomalies” Mr. Wood provides intrigue and fascinate.

His premises for those “anomalies” are based in anachronisms, which he lists this way:

1. The first kind involves objects, beliefs or practices from our present that show up in the past.

2. The second kind involves objects, beliefs, or practices from our future that show up in our past.

(The explanation of what he means shows up in his Introduction, but was, in my estimation, a bit abstruse, and his encouragements “to read on” or “to read the book” were redundant, not annoying, but slightly excessive. After all, I had the book in hand and got it to read, didn’t I?)

As Mr. Wood presents many weird happenstances and bizarre items, such as a painting of the baby Jesus and his mother, with Jesus holding a toy helicopter – the painting done in 1460, well before Leonardo’s drawings of proto-helicopters and, obviously, much before helicopters became a part of modern aircraft [Page 17 ff.] -- one rushes to read his other finds.



He gives readers accounts of death rays, used by the Romans in 214 B.C., during the siege of Syracuse. [Chapter 4], the use of modern-like surgery practices on England’s Prince Hal (King Henry V) from a war wound in 1402 [Chapter 15], the Voynich Manuscript – that bizarre book of strange, unearthly drawings and an unknown language, from [circa] 1420 [Chapter 11], and UFOs in 1350 A.D. as depicted in a fresco from that date [Chapter 37].



He discusses Saturn’s mystery moon [Chapter 38], a paintings from the Middle Ages that have what-seem-to-be images resembling UFOs, as described by modern witnesses [Page 161 ff].

He shows a 1602 map from China that pre-figured map renderings not used until 1906 [Chapter 16].

I could go on, about The Internet in 1945 [Chapter 31] or a 19th Century French cartoonist, Albert Robida, whose 1882 book, Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century) presented prescient images and mentions of flat-screen televisions, cell phones, and nations that declare bankruptcy(!), among other modern items and services:



But you might want to discover this wealth of intriguing anomalies yourself, by getting the 220 page book from bookstores or internet venues such as Amazon, Powells, and the book publisher itself, New Page Books, a division of The Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ – www.newpagebooks.com or www.careerpress.com



Lamont Wood is a facile writer who wishes to enlighten and entertain. He has done so with this book.

RR