Books: What the Public Will Buy

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EDGAR CAYCE: THE SLEEPING PROPHET by Jess Stearn. 280 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

Kentuckian Edgar Cayce was a semiliterate health evangelist who boasted miraculous curative and prophetic powers. He died at 67 in 1945, unsung except by a few equally obscure biographers. Freelance Author Jess Stearn has rediscovered Cayce, and strains mightily to prove that his batting average was close to 100%.

Perhaps Cayce (pronounced Casey) should not be judged yet, since all the returns are not in. Readers are therefore put on the alert. Cayce said that China would become Christian and democratic by 1968, that Los Angeles and Manhattan Island would vanish into the sea by 1998, and that a non-Communist Russia will become the "hope of the world."

In the faith-healing department, Cayce recommended one or two almonds a day as a cancer preventive, peanut-oil massage for diabetes and, to relieve fatigue, foot baths in hot coffee brewed from used grounds. Stearn arrays—or arraigns—a host of witnesses, almost none of them named, who were snatched from certain decay by the diagnoses that Cayce delivered in his trances.

If Edgar Cayce ever performed a miracle, this book is it. It's No. 3 this week on the bestseller list.