"A Guide to the Afterlife" review

"A Guide to the Afterlife" by Daniel Quinn & Tom Whalen – This was a weird book. I mean, really weird. Not bad, though. Some interesting ideas and concepts, for sure. However, I would be remiss not to mention that it also seemed to have some weak points.

Initially, it was an interesting read. The book was described as a work done by someone with a photographic memory who had a near death experience and got his hands on a copy of the book, as almost everyone who dies managed to get a copy of the book, according to the authors. It seems coincidental, but it is not. So, this guy got a copy, looked at it, then when he was not as dead as it first appeared, he remembered the book and wrote it from memory, word for word.

Some of the ideas were interesting, with death as a mixture of Heaven and Hell, and formerly devoutly religious people feeling betrayed and essentially giving up their religions, dismissing them as hoaxes.

This was supposed to be some gigantic wasteland, a desert without suffering, since there was no longer any need for people to eat or drink. There were some new ideas, as well, such as skin hanging loosely on people, and controversies surrounding "contact" with the living, a neat reversal of the same controversies here, when some claim to have made contact with those who have died, or seeing ghosts, or what have you. Definitely, there was some food for thought in this work, as there tends to be with just about everything that Daniel Quinn is involved with.

The latter part of it went on a bit too long, I felt. Though the idea of referencing authors who wrote works once they were dead sounds interesting, going into as much detail in referencing them kind of grew a bit cumbersome, admittedly. It just seemed a little overdone, when the idea was already well established and the point made. Just an opinion, I am not trying to insult the book. But the last thirty or so pages were harder to read (for me) then the first hundred pages or so, it felt.