Edgar Cayce Jr., born in 1877 in rural Kentucky and educated only through the eighth grade, was a man with special powers. Known as the sleeping prophet, Cayce was an endless source of information. Awake, he had no knowledge of any of the subjects he discussed, but in a trance he prescribed medical treatments, predicted future world events, interpreted past lives (including the life of Jesus Christ), designed innovative technologies, wrote screenplays, spoke in foreign languages, and brought spiritual messages from the other side. Although he never examined patients, and often gave trance readings for people hundreds of miles away, his medical diagnoses were deemed to be correct nearly ninety per cent of the time, and his predictions were often uncannily accurate. The first researcher to have unlimited access to thousands of Cayce’s documents, Sidney Kirkpatrick has written a fascinating, definitive biography of a humble man whose psychic work prefigured the new-age and alternative-health movements, and brought him a huge following.