Sum
Tales from the Afterlives
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4.2 • 52 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
In this startling book, David Eagleman shows us forty possibilities of life beyond death. With wit and humanity, he asks the key questions about existence, hope, technology and love. These short stories are full of big ideas and bold imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Hmm
I wouldn't like our local priest reading this but still was well written
Sum
What a lad of bollox.
When you are dead
You are dead
You are dead
No more to say.
Brilliantly thought-provoking
Think Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges). Think Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino). Think Happy Birthday Wanda June & God Bless You Dr Kevorkian (Kurt Vonnegut).
That's the calibre and something of the style and content of this book.