If there was a prize for the book which best meets its moment, Getting the Message by Tom Davies would surely win. At a time when the world is erupting in terror, with riots, bombs and street shootings everywhere, this book tells you to take a close look at what's coming out of your television screens-especially the violence obsessed news - and you will be able to understand all the disasters that are befalling us and why. Tom Davies excludes newspapers from his onslaught on media, arguing that they could - and should - react to and record the cultural events and their communities, even the bad stuff. He focuses his attack on the big reporting news machines like the BBC, CNN, ITN and Al Jazeera, all of which become menaces to world peace, he says with their continuous streams of active violent imagery which Davies calls the black rain, now sheeting down onto almost every country in the world, setting up killings as a global fashion, seeking out the alienated and sick urging them to conduct mass killings, in their search for new identity while filling the whole world with fear. Told in the form of an autobiography, this book tells how such ideas were given to Davies in a series of visions when as a young man was teaching with Voluntary Service Overseas the paddy fields of North Malaysia. Getting the message then is the story of a man, who for the rest of his life, sets out to unpack the meaning of his visionS and understand how they relate to the world. He certainly understands the workings of the media since he was once Atticus on the Sunday Times, feature writer on the Sunday Telegraph and for more than two years Pendennis diarist on the Observer. He has now been a full-time writer for 30 years, producing 20 books one of which, Merlin the magician and the Pacific Coast Highway, was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook travel prize claimed by Bono as being the one book that saved his life. He won the Winifred Mary Stanford prize for the best book with a religious theme. Getting the message is an insightful, sometimes poignant and often hilarious account of one man's painful journey along the path of the Cross. More recently Davies has found enormous support for his ideas on social media - his attack on the media for supporting terrorists with global publicity after the killings in Paris achieved well over half 1 million visitors. You can read this post in the last three pages of this book. None of his followers had a voice but they do now. Whatever else this writer is not alone.