Books in Brief: The Mysterious Shroud

The Mysterious Shroud, by Ian Wilson (Doubleday, 158 pp., $19.95)

For the current state of knowledge on the Shroud of Turin, this is the book to read. It subsumes, if it does not entirely displace, such books as Barbet’s A Doctor at Calvary (1953), Walsh’s The Shroud (1963), and Wilson’s own Shroud of Turin (1978). The present book brings the investigative story up to date and comes to important conclusions, although they are put with careful restraint. Wilson details the results of the 1978 investigation of the garment by a team of U.S. scientists expert in electronic, microscope, and computer technology; he fills us in on the results of scholarship between 1978 and the present; and he points to new investigative paths that should be followed during the next decade. He is entirely fair to skeptics. The respected scientist Dr. Walter McCrone, for example, concluded from microscope analysis that the Shroud, because it contained “paint” particles, was the work of a clever artist. Wilson gives due consideration to McCrone’s thesis, but then presents

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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The Mysterious Shroud, by Ian Wilson (Doubleday, 158 pp., $19.95)

For the current state of knowledge on the Shroud of Turin, this is the book to read. It subsumes, if it does not entirely displace, such books as Barbet’s A Doctor at Calvary (1953), Walsh’s The Shroud (1963), and Wilson’s own Shroud of Turin (1978). The present book brings the investigative story up to date and comes to important conclusions, although they are put with careful restraint. Wilson details the results of the 1978 investigation of the garment by a team of U.S. scientists expert in electronic, microscope, and computer technology; he fills us in on the results of scholarship between 1978 and the present; and he points to new investigative paths that should be followed during the next decade. He is entirely fair to skeptics. The respected scientist Dr. Walter McCrone, for example, concluded from microscope analysis that the Shroud, because it contained “paint” particles, was the work of a clever artist. Wilson gives due consideration to McCrone’s thesis, but then presents