Jadoo – John A. Keel
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Someone, we know not who, once called Jadoo “the greatest book ever written on the black magic of the Orient.” But we do know that there will never again be another book like it. Jadoo, a Hindi word meaning “Black Magic,” captures a world that is now lost to usβthe strange, dark, mysterious world that was once called the “Orient.”
This story of a real-life Indiana Jones of the 1950s named John Keel contains everything but a trip to Venus in a flying saucer–a subject our newsman/explorer would become famous for a decade later. In Egypt, the fearless Keel was cursed by a mummy and befriended members of a strange snake-charming cult. In Iraq, he played Russian roulette with a notorious desert bandit and lived among the Yezidi devil-worshippers. Later, in India, he was buried alive and discovered the secret of the Indian rope trick, which he then performed for incredulous reporters in New Delhi. And in a riveting finale, he chased the Abominable Snowman through the little known Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim before being unceremoniously booted out of Singapore for being “an undesirable alien.”