I first discovered David Eagleman through his wonderful PBS television series on "The Brain". As an outstanding expert in neuroscience, as well as a exemplar television personality, Eagleman's enthusiasm for brain science and psychology inevitably leads to an understanding of philosophy and the meaning of existence. Here in "Sum" Eagleman explores the mystery of human consciousness through a series of fables on the afterlife, each leading to conclusions that may confound our notions of the afterlife that we may hope to encounter. While some of the more negative customer reviews I've read here on Amazon seem to have found Eagleman's thoughts on the afterlife to be nihilistic, depressing and anti-religious; I found his narratives to be thought-provoking and in some ways life-affirming.
At the heart of it, Eagleman is a brain scientist and a humanitarian. In his television series on the brain he states how the human brain is the most wonderful known thing that exists in the universe. He's compassionate on how mental illnesses, substance abuse, war and genocide can be understood on a brain level. Taken in that context, "Sum" celebrates the joys of life even though life can also seem tragic in many ways.
A couple of negative reviews complained that the sub-title of "Sum" is misleading, that instead of finding a garden-variety account of near-death experiences with white lights, celestial reunions with dearly departed, and encounters with God; they found something else that they didn't want to see, that strives to question not only the possibility of the afterlife but also the notions of what we think the afterlife should look like.
In this sense, I would suggest that "Sum" can be taken as 40 arguments in favor of what is going on here and now, with the people we care about, those we are able to help to feel better about themselves, and our capacity to enjoy what we have. As we long for heaven, look forward to eternal bliss, hope for something better than a cruel and seemingly meaningless life on earth, and fear that death may just be an obliteration of all we know and love; Eagleman reminds us that as good as the afterlife may seem, life itself may not be as bad as we think.
For a scientist, Eagleman's style of writing in the genre of fiction is clear, economical and has a good sense of flow. I breezed through this narrow but very thought-provoking volume in less than a few days.
To those negative reviews that would classify Eagleman as anti-religion or anti-Christian, I would counter that notion by saying that I have never in "Sum" nor in Eagleman's TV series on "The Brain" seen Eagleman to treat religion or Christianity with any level of disrespect or ridicule. If anything, I would think that those among the religious might want to give "Sum" an even chance and consider how Eagleman's ideas might challenge us to explore our purposes in life and what the God we choose to believe in might want us to do while we are alive and able to love and care for one another and also enjoy the good things in life that we believe to be His (or Her?) creation.
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Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives Kindle Edition
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherVintage
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Publication dateFebruary 10, 2009
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File size1087 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Eagleman is a true original. Read Sum and be amazed."—Time Magazine
“You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman's Sum. If you read it and aren't enchanted I will eat 40 hats.” --Stephen Fry
“Delightful, thought-provoking… full of touching moments and glorious wit.”—Alexander McCall Smith, The New York Times Book Review
"Bracing, provocative, fun. . . . It challenges and teases as it spins out different parables of possibility."--Houston Chronicle
"This is a scientist and exceptionally talented writer using the idea of the afterlife to reflect on our innermost fears and desires and also as a way of dissecting how we live." —Tampa Tribune
“This delightful, thought-provoking little collection belongs to that category of strange, unclassifiable books that will haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned. It is full of tangential insights into the human condition and poetic thought experiments . . . . It is also full of touching moments and glorious wit of the sort one only hopes will be in copious supply on the other side.”—The New York Times
"Teeming, writhing with imagination."--Los Angeles Times
"David Eagleman's Sum envisions a multiplicity of afterlives: pasts relived in shuffle mode, cast in the dreams of others, and dictated by our credit card reports.”—Vanity Fair
"Imaginative and inventive." —Wall Street Journal
"It takes someone ridiculously smart to write something as deceptively simple as SUM." —Denver Daily News
"With both a childlike sense of wonder and a trenchant flair for irony, the Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist generously offers forty variations on the theme of God and the afterlife, imagining what each of us might find when we shuffle off this mortal coil." &...
“You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman's Sum. If you read it and aren't enchanted I will eat 40 hats.” --Stephen Fry
“Delightful, thought-provoking… full of touching moments and glorious wit.”—Alexander McCall Smith, The New York Times Book Review
"Bracing, provocative, fun. . . . It challenges and teases as it spins out different parables of possibility."--Houston Chronicle
"This is a scientist and exceptionally talented writer using the idea of the afterlife to reflect on our innermost fears and desires and also as a way of dissecting how we live." —Tampa Tribune
“This delightful, thought-provoking little collection belongs to that category of strange, unclassifiable books that will haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned. It is full of tangential insights into the human condition and poetic thought experiments . . . . It is also full of touching moments and glorious wit of the sort one only hopes will be in copious supply on the other side.”—The New York Times
"Teeming, writhing with imagination."--Los Angeles Times
"David Eagleman's Sum envisions a multiplicity of afterlives: pasts relived in shuffle mode, cast in the dreams of others, and dictated by our credit card reports.”—Vanity Fair
"Imaginative and inventive." —Wall Street Journal
"It takes someone ridiculously smart to write something as deceptively simple as SUM." —Denver Daily News
"With both a childlike sense of wonder and a trenchant flair for irony, the Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist generously offers forty variations on the theme of God and the afterlife, imagining what each of us might find when we shuffle off this mortal coil." &...
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A clever little book by a neuroscientist translates lofty concepts of infinity and death into accessible human terms. What happens after we die? Eagleman wonders in each of these brief, evocative segments. Are we consigned to replay a lifetime's worth of accumulated acts, as he suggests in Sum, spending six days clipping your nails or six weeks waiting for a green light? Is heaven a bureaucracy, as in Reins, where God has lost control of the workload? Will we download our consciousnesses into a computer to live in a virtual world, as suggested in Great Expectations, where God exists after all and has gone through great trouble and expense to construct an afterlife for us? Or is God actually the size of a bacterium, battling good and evil on the battlefield of surface proteins, and thus unaware of humans, who are merely the nutritional substrate? Mostly, the author underscores in Will-'o-the-Wisp, humans desperately want to matter, and in afterlife search out the ripples left in our wake. Eagleman's turned out a well-executed and thought-provoking book. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Sum In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting inline. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.EgalitaireIn the afterlife you discover that God understands the complexities of life. She had originally submitted to peer pressure when She structured Her universe like all the other gods had, with a binary categorization of people into good and evil. But it didn’t take long for Her to realize that humans could be good in many ways and simultaneously corrupt and meanspirited in other ways. How was She to arbitrate who goes to Heaven and who to Hell? Might not it be possible, She considered, that a man could be an embezzler and still give to charitable causes? Might not a woman be an adulteress but bring pleasure and security to two men’s lives? Might not a child unwittingly divulge secrets that splinter a family? Dividing the population into two categories—good and bad—seemed like a more reasonable task when She was younger, but with experience these decisions became more difficult. She composed complex formulas to weigh hundreds of factors, and ran computer programs that rolled out long strips of paper with eternal decisions. But Her sensitivities revolted at this automation—and when the computer generated a decision She disagreed with, She took the opportunity to kick out the plug in rage. That afternoon She listened to the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled their cases earnestly. She covered Her ears and moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were multidimensional, and She could no longer live under the rigid architecture of Her youthful choices.Not all gods suffer over this; we can consider ourselves lucky that in death we answer to a God with deep sensitivity to the byzantine hearts of Her creations. For months She moped around Her living room in Heaven, head drooped like a bulrush, while the lines piled up. Her advisors advised Her to delegate the decision making, but She loved Her humans too much to leave them to the care of anyone else.In a moment of desperation the thought crossed Her mind to let everyone wait on line indefinitely, letting them work it out on their own. But then a better idea struck Her generous spirit. She could afford it: She would grant everyone, every last human, a place in Heaven. After all, everyone had something good inside; it was part of the design specifications. Her new plan brought back the bounce to Her gait, returned the color to Her cheeks. She shut down the operations in Hell, fired the Devil, and brought every last human to be by Her side in Heaven. Newcomers or old-timers, nefarious or righteous: under the new system, everyone gets equal time to speak with Her. Most people find Her a little garrulous and oversolicitous, but She cannot be accused of not caring.The most important aspect of Her new system is that everyone is treated equally. There is no longer fire for some and harp music for others. The afterlife is no longer defined by cots versus waterbeds, raw potatoes versus sushi, hot water versus champagne. Everyone is a brother to all, and for the first time an idea has been realized that never came to fruition on Earth: true equality.The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote.So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell.Circle of FriendsWhen you die, you feel as though there were some subtle change, but everything looks approximately the same. You get up and brush your teeth. You kiss your spouse and kids and leave for the office. There is less traffic than normal. The rest of your building seems less full, as though it’s a holiday. But everyone in your office is here, and they greet you kindly. You feel strangely popular. Everyone you run into is someone you know. At some point, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife: the world is only made up of people you’ve met before.It’s a small fraction of the world population—about 0.00002 percent—but it seems like plenty to you.It turns out that only the people you remember are here. So the woman with whom you shared a glance in the elevator may or may not be included. Your second-grade teacher is here, with most of the class. Your parents, your cousins, and your spectrum of friends through the years. All your old lovers. Your boss, your grandmothers, and the waitress who served your food each day at lunch. Those you dated, those you almost dated, those you longed for. It is a blissful opportunity to spend quality time with your one thousand connections, to renew fading ties, to catch up with those you let slip away.It is only after several weeks of this that you begin to feel forlorn. You wonder what’s different as you saunter through the vast quiet parks with a friend or two. No strangers grace the empty park benches. No family unknown to you throws bread crumbs for the ducks and makes you smile because of their laughter.As you step into the street, you note there are no crowds, no buildings teeming with workers, no distant cities bustling, no hospitals running 24/7 with patients dying and staff rushing, no trains howling into the night with sardined passengers on their way home. Very few foreigners. You begin to consider all the things unfamiliar to you. You’ve never known, you realize, how to vulcanize rubber to make a tire. And now those factories stand empty. You’ve never known how to fashion a silicon chip from beach sand, how to launch rockets out of the atmosphere, how to pit olives or lay railroad tracks. And now those industries are shut down.The missing crowds make you lonely.You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.Descent of SpeciesIn the afterlife, you are treated to a generous opportunity: you can choose whatever you would like to be in the next life. Would you like to be a member of the opposite sex? Born into royalty? A philosopher with bottomless profundity? A soldier facing triumphant battles?But perhaps you’ve just returned here from a hard life. Perhaps you were tortured by the enormity of the decisions and responsibilities that surrounded you, and now there’s only one thing you yearn for: simplicity. That’s permissible. So for the next round, you choose to be a horse. You covet the bliss of that simple life: afternoons of grazing in grassy fields, the handsome angles of your skeleton and the prominence of your muscles, the peace of the slow-flicking tail or the steam rifling through your nostrils as you lope across snow-blanketed plains.You announce your decision. Incantations are muttered, a wand is waved, and your body begins to metamorphose into a horse. Your muscles start to bulge; a mat of strong hair erupts to cover you like a comfortable blanket in winter. The thickening and lengthening of your neck immediately feels normal as it comes about. Your carotid arteries grow in diameter, your fingers blend hoofward, your knees stiffen, your hips strengthen, and meanwhile, as your skull lengthens into its new shape, your brain races in its changes: your cortex retreats as your cerebellum grows, the homunculus melts man to horse, neurons redirect, synapses unplug and replug on their way to equestrian patterns, and your dream of understanding what it is like to be a horse gallops toward you from the distance. Your concern about human affairs begins to slip away, your cynicism about human behavior melts, and even your human way of thinking begins to drift away from you.Suddenly, for just a moment, you are aware of the problem you overlooked. The more you become a horse, the more you forget the original wish. You forget what it was like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse. This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse halfman, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives. And that’s not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won’t have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won’t understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Booklist
A slender volume of bite-size vignettes, Sum appears to be a whimsical novelty, amusing for idle perusal but quickly forgotten. In it, neuroscientist Eagleman offers 40 fates that may await us in the afterlife. A close reading of each carefully measured chapter provides an insight into human nature that is both poignant and sobering. In one afterlife, you relive all your experiences in carefully categorized groups: sleeping 30 years straight, sitting five months on the toilet, spending 200 days in the shower, and so forth. In another, you can be whatever you want, including a horse that forgets its original humanity. There are afterlives where you meet God, in one a God who endlessly reads Frankenstein, lamenting the tragic lot of creators; in another a God, female this time, in whose immense corpus earth is a mere cell. Eagleman’s engaging mixture of dark humor, witty quips, and unsettling observations about the human psyche should engage a readership extending from New Age buffs to amateur philosophers. --Carl Hays
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Back Cover
SUM is a dazzling exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been consideredeach presented as a vignette that offers us a stunning lens through which to see ourselves here and now. In one afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures who built us to figure out what they could not. In a different version of the afterlife you work as a background character in other peoples dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple struggling with discontent, or that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember, or that the hereafter includes the thousands of previous gods who no longer attract followers. In some afterlives you are split into your different ages; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been; in others you are re-created from your credit card records and Internet history. David Eagleman proposes many versions of our purpose here; we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers, we are reunions for a scattered confederacy of atoms, we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what makes couples stick together. These wonderfully imagined talesat once witty, wistful and unsettlingare rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology and desire that exposed radiant new facets of our humanity.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
David Eagleman works as a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B001TKA0VO
- Publisher : Vintage; 1st edition (February 10, 2009)
- Publication date : February 10, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 1087 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 130 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
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Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2019
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28 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2015
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This is a quick, enjoyable read of forty different possibilities after death. I found all the stories intriguing. Each chapter is just a few pages long. I read it in just a couple of hours; starting it one evening before bed and finished the next as our plane was approaching home after a trip to Chicago.
It's difficult to write about this without giving too much away; if you want take the stories at their freshest, stop reading my review and read the book now. Come back when you've finished (in an hour or two) to compare your thoughts with mine.
In many of the chapters we can't communicate with God, or the creator(s), because there are such differences of scale or understanding. "Do you think it would have any meaning at all if you displayed one of your Shakespearean plays to a bacterium? Of course not. Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless." (P 16). Also: "She is the elephant described by the blind men; all partial descriptions with no understanding of the whole." (P 99)
This theme resonates with me; I first saw a form of this idea on the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan. Because God is beyond us we can't perfectly conceive of him (Sagan was talking about aliens not God). Consider a two dimensional universe; one with length and width but no height - thinner than a flattest, thinnest paper. Beings in this universe would develop math and philosophy based on their experiences. Then suppose a cube appears over the universe casting a varying shaped shadow as it revolves above this two dimensional universe. The two dimensional beings could see the shadow shape change but could not conceive of a three dimensional cube. We can only conceive of those things which meet our scale.
Other stories show the creator(s) were imperfect and even heaven is imperfect. "He is in the position of an amateur magician who performs for small children and suddenly has to play to skeptical adults." (P 93). Even then all is not lost: "He has recently faced his limitations, and this has brought Him closer to us." (P 94)
Still another recurring theme considers our physical, atomic structure of bacterium, molecules, atoms and quarks. "But it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an accidental collection; each was labeled as composing you and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you're not gone, your'e simply taking on different forms." (P106).
My favorite story was the last: Reversal where we live our lives backward "The pleasures of a lifetime of intercourse are relived, culminating in kissed instead of sleep." (P109)
The most disturbing story was chapter four: Descent of Species. When given a chance to go back to earth as anything you want, pick wisely.
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, not a theologian or a philosopher. This book is not for conservative religious, regardless of faith. But if you would like a small diversion to consider what might be ahead of us.
It's difficult to write about this without giving too much away; if you want take the stories at their freshest, stop reading my review and read the book now. Come back when you've finished (in an hour or two) to compare your thoughts with mine.
In many of the chapters we can't communicate with God, or the creator(s), because there are such differences of scale or understanding. "Do you think it would have any meaning at all if you displayed one of your Shakespearean plays to a bacterium? Of course not. Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless." (P 16). Also: "She is the elephant described by the blind men; all partial descriptions with no understanding of the whole." (P 99)
This theme resonates with me; I first saw a form of this idea on the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan. Because God is beyond us we can't perfectly conceive of him (Sagan was talking about aliens not God). Consider a two dimensional universe; one with length and width but no height - thinner than a flattest, thinnest paper. Beings in this universe would develop math and philosophy based on their experiences. Then suppose a cube appears over the universe casting a varying shaped shadow as it revolves above this two dimensional universe. The two dimensional beings could see the shadow shape change but could not conceive of a three dimensional cube. We can only conceive of those things which meet our scale.
Other stories show the creator(s) were imperfect and even heaven is imperfect. "He is in the position of an amateur magician who performs for small children and suddenly has to play to skeptical adults." (P 93). Even then all is not lost: "He has recently faced his limitations, and this has brought Him closer to us." (P 94)
Still another recurring theme considers our physical, atomic structure of bacterium, molecules, atoms and quarks. "But it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an accidental collection; each was labeled as composing you and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you're not gone, your'e simply taking on different forms." (P106).
My favorite story was the last: Reversal where we live our lives backward "The pleasures of a lifetime of intercourse are relived, culminating in kissed instead of sleep." (P109)
The most disturbing story was chapter four: Descent of Species. When given a chance to go back to earth as anything you want, pick wisely.
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, not a theologian or a philosopher. This book is not for conservative religious, regardless of faith. But if you would like a small diversion to consider what might be ahead of us.
13 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2016
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The book is a series of conjectures about the nature of the afterlife, and necessarily, the nature of God. Each tale relates the author's ideas on what happens when we die and the period following that ending. Each story is written matter-of-factly and is quite believable until the reader tries to keep reminding himself grounded in the "real" afterlife, which no one can really prove, one way or another. The comparison keeps the brain busy with maintaining the self in reality, while being curious about the latest tale and how reasonable it seems if you ignore the "facts." The facts themselves would find itself at home in the volume, and therefore the "real" afterlife is no more believable than the various make-believe versions. A friend who also read the book commented that it made him feel as if he were being "eaten alive."
6 people found this helpful
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The Reading Room
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thought Provoking Quick-Reads
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 3, 2019Verified Purchase
A very good collection of themed shorts – 4 Stars
There are many reasons I enjoyed this collection. Here are just a few:
● Each tale is only a few pages long – perfect reading for lunch breaks.
● Although the concept of God appears in some tales, this is not a book centred on religion or religious beliefs.
● The collection works to evoke a range of emotions – some of the ‘Afterlives’ were pleasing constructs, others definitely not.
● The concepts of life and death are not fixed – the author is just as inventive with imagined timescales.
● The book is well written and well presented – the number of editing errors in the Kindle version I read was minimal.
● As with all collections, I liked some of the tales more than others, but each was so short I never felt ‘bogged-down’ by any one of them.
The only reason I didn’t give this the full 5 Star rating is I felt the tales were heavily weighted towards maths, science and technology, and perhaps a few ideas centred around a more arts orientated interpretation would have added an additional dimension. That said, this is a very good read, and I’d definitely recommend it if you’re looking for something thought provoking and a little bit different.
There are many reasons I enjoyed this collection. Here are just a few:
● Each tale is only a few pages long – perfect reading for lunch breaks.
● Although the concept of God appears in some tales, this is not a book centred on religion or religious beliefs.
● The collection works to evoke a range of emotions – some of the ‘Afterlives’ were pleasing constructs, others definitely not.
● The concepts of life and death are not fixed – the author is just as inventive with imagined timescales.
● The book is well written and well presented – the number of editing errors in the Kindle version I read was minimal.
● As with all collections, I liked some of the tales more than others, but each was so short I never felt ‘bogged-down’ by any one of them.
The only reason I didn’t give this the full 5 Star rating is I felt the tales were heavily weighted towards maths, science and technology, and perhaps a few ideas centred around a more arts orientated interpretation would have added an additional dimension. That said, this is a very good read, and I’d definitely recommend it if you’re looking for something thought provoking and a little bit different.
6 people found this helpful
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Mike Haines
4.0 out of 5 stars
Challenging.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 31, 2019Verified Purchase
The starting point is presuming that there is an Afterlife at all, - If there isn't, then no book, - Not a question that can be answered. This is a book I need to read again to ensure i,ve distilled all the points, it's very thought provoking - some of the possible afterlives are not too wonderful, - some are disturbing, the various types of deity, not all comes across as in the biblical sense of divine beings. I think all of us speculate as we get older and grow, - what might happen to us? - and this book adds value to those thoughts. - not a big book and well worth taking time to read.
4 people found this helpful
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James Ingram
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best book I ever read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 24, 2020Verified Purchase
I bought my first copy of this book at a bookshop on Charing Cross Road (Foyles, I think), back in 2009 or so.
I had no idea what it was about but it had a lovely cover and I felt like taking a risk.
I opened it on the tube. And I didn't stop reading (except to walk home) until I was done.
The next day, I returned to Foyles and bought another five copies, which I gave to various friends. Since then, I have always had at least one copy in my house. But I try to keep two copies, because you never know when one of your guests is going to turn out to be EXACTLY the type of person who will love this book.
It's charming, wonderful, happy, grim, dark, pessimistic, optimistic, and mind-expanding.
All in manageable min-chunks.
I had no idea what it was about but it had a lovely cover and I felt like taking a risk.
I opened it on the tube. And I didn't stop reading (except to walk home) until I was done.
The next day, I returned to Foyles and bought another five copies, which I gave to various friends. Since then, I have always had at least one copy in my house. But I try to keep two copies, because you never know when one of your guests is going to turn out to be EXACTLY the type of person who will love this book.
It's charming, wonderful, happy, grim, dark, pessimistic, optimistic, and mind-expanding.
All in manageable min-chunks.
2 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars
Clever, very clever
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 23, 2017Verified Purchase
If you want a book that will make you think, this is the one. If you want a book that seems to be made up of small snacks but find that each of them burst in your mouth with a million flavours, this is the one. If you want a book of very short stories that linger in your mind and are written by a man of genius whose imagination and insights are breathtaking, this is the one.
3 people found this helpful
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Katarina
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly Recommended Read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 11, 2018Verified Purchase
I have read & re-read this book at least 5 times. It is one of my all time favourite books and I bought few copies for friends and family who love it just as much. Intriguing concept, beautiful execution & thoroughly thought-provoking. The audio version which includes Stephen Fry among other narrators does justice to the prose.
First time I have been this engrossed in a book since the Harry Potter series, many years ago. David Eagleman's other works, though very different from this one, are also fascinating.
First time I have been this engrossed in a book since the Harry Potter series, many years ago. David Eagleman's other works, though very different from this one, are also fascinating.
4 people found this helpful
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