Book Review: Don't Kiss Them Good-Bye

PSYCHIC SMACKDOWN
PART 1 OF 3
Part 2 | Part 3

Last year we told you about Don’t Kiss Them Good-Bye, Allison DuBois’ autobiography published in 2004. I read it last week and unexpectedly found myself deep in the throes of controversy. Allison’s controversy, that is, and that of Gary E. Schwartz, for whom she was research medium in his studies on the survival of human energy at the University of Arizona. I made the mistake of Googling Schwartz and checking out a few Medium message boards.

What started out as a simple one-book review of Don’t Kiss Them Good-Bye has now expanded to encompass a second book (Gary E. Schwartz’ Truth About Medium) and a plethora of forum posts and online articles from professional skeptics. It’s all quite juicy.

This post is first in a series of three I was going to dub The DuBois Debate until I found out that is also the name of a famous dispute between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington early last century. Who knew? Instead, I will settle for Psychic Smackdown. The entries are:

• Part 1: Book Review: Don’t Kiss Them Good-Bye by Allison DuBois’ (this post)
• Part 2: Book Review: The Truth About Medium by Gary E. Schwartz
• Part 3: Psychic Smackdown (a review of discussions on this subject floating about the Internet)

I went into the reading of Don’t Kiss Them Good-Bye hoping for insight into Allison DuBois as a person, and I did get that. What I didn’t get were stories about her work with the police, and that surprised me. If you plan to read the book, pay attention to the Introduction where she describes the book as her way to share how she is affected by being a medium. That is what the book is all about, along with tips for raising your young medium and helping her hone her gift.

If you are a skeptic, this is not the book for you. You will find it sappy and manipulative and annoying.

If, on the other hand, you are a believer, you will find it touching and inspirational and joyful.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

1. My Way: Allison deals with her feelings about the death of her father in 2002.
2. A Little Girl Meets the Other Side: Six year old Allison sees her first ghost in the form of her recently deceased great-grandfather. Her mother says she has an overactive imagination so she learns to suppress her gift.
3. Angel on My Shoulder: Eleven year old Allison avoids abduction by riding her bike away from two men who ask if she wants a ride home. It’s not as dramatic as it sounds. That’s pretty much all she tell us, except the part where her mother didn’t report the incident and a paperboy was later abducted and sexually assaulted in her neighborhood. This is when she “felt the calling to turn the tide against child predators.”
4. Missing: Allison describes the Texas case the Medium pilot is based on where she worked with Rangers to find a missing girl. I hoped for new details but they pretty much covered all the basics in the pilot. The missing girl’s body was found three years later. Allison also describes information she provided to police about the Elizabeth Smart abduction, which she says was ignored but proved to be accurate later. Additional stories involve three people lost in the desert, “headtapping” (mindreading), and the murder of a witness. (I know I said there were no stories about her work with the police yet her I am describing some. I guess they just weren’t meaty enough to stick with me.)
5. Kindergarten Mediums: Allison’s describes her daughters’ gifts and provides instruction for parents with gifted pre-teens as well as cautions for parents who want their children to be gifted but really maybe they just have a learning problem. A.D.D. does not a psychic make, apparently.
6. Hormones and Teen Psychics: Allison describes being a teenage drunk and provides instruction for parents with gifted teens. She also tells the story about how one of her “guides” told her to move her bed, which she did, and then was awakened in the middle of the night as a truck crashed into her bedroom right where the bed used to be.
7. Empathy: Doctors and nurses, people in law enforcement, and others who follow their hunches may be a bit psychic.
8. Painful Living, Peaceful Good-byes: A dead soldier asks for Allison’s help when she visits the Vietnam War Memorial in 2000. Next, she uses the 9/11 tragedy to urge people not to squander their lives.
9. Little Things: Allison briefly describes several readings: a teenage girl wants to contact her best friend who died in a car accident; a truck driver wants to contact his mother who recently died from a stroke; a group reading where the skeptic observer’s dead grandfather keeps butting in; a family group session where two sisters and their aunt want to contact grandpa; an impromptu reading in a bar; her favorite skeptic, whom she is still in contact with since his 2002 death; and a pilot’s sister.
10. Gifted: Allison describes what it is like to be a psychic and talks a little bit about skeptics (people who aren’t sure one way or the other and who are not easily persuaded) and angry skeptics (people who make mediums targets of their anger about their loss of a loved one or who feel “superior in intelligence to the rest of society”). She also describes what to do and not to do when you go for a reading.
11. Do You Really Want to Know?: More talk about living a purposeful life with a little Heaven and Hell thrown in for good measure.
12. If You Never Die: Allison gets back in touch with her high school pal Domini shortly before her death in 2001 and tells us pets live on after death, too. Even birds.
13. Once in a Lifetime: Allison provides an in-depth discussion of a reading to give readers “an idea of what can occur when visiting with the other side.”
14. Baby Boy: Allison advises a friend about the health of her unborn child and tells us about a few other medical readings she has performed.
15. Loving a Medium: A chapter written by Joe DuBois, Allison’s rocket scientist husband.
16. Science and the Other Side: Allison becomes a lab rat for Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., at the University of Arizona’s Human Energy Systems Laboratory in Tuscon in 2001. She describes the dramatic impromptu reading she did for him on their first meeting and a few later controlled readings, including one with Deepak Chopra. She also describes her first almost-foray into TV with Oracles, a reality series pilot that never made it to the air but where she met Kelsey Grammer for the first time, the executive producer of Medium.

I realize this is more of a general summary than a personal review, but that’s all I’ve got on this one. I am much more opinionated in Part 2 and Part 3 gets downright lively. I will link everything up once all three parts are posted.

Tags: allison dubois, book, book review, don’t kiss them goodbye, medium, medium nbc