This may be the quiet before the quiet, as they say, but I’m very excited to get this particular book out there. Tomorrow is launch day—at long last—for The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson.
Although Ian Stevenson died in 2007, he still commands a devoted following and is respected by skeptics and believers alike, with many viewing him as the scientist who uncovered the strongest evidence for life after death. Even Carl Sagan thought we should look at his work seriously. This is the first and only biography of Stevenson’s extraordinary life and career, from founding the Division of Perceptual Studies in 1968—a parapsychology division within the medical school at the University of Virginia that still operates today—to his relentless fight to make parapsychological research a legitimate scientific discipline. Stevenson was a skeptic himself, impatient with both outright dismissal and blind belief, and deeply frustrated by the sensationalism surrounding the field. Neither religious nor mystical, he believed the afterlife would one day be explained by natural science. I came to this book as a diehard nonbeliever—a science writer and psychology professor whose research on afterlife beliefs spans over 25 years—but Stevenson’s challenging findings forced me to question everything I thought I knew.
I do hope you give it a read and take this strange journey with me!
“Bering has written a brave, surprising, and deeply compelling book. What begins as a skeptic’s attempt to ‘explain away’ belief in an afterlife becomes something far more interesting: a witty, clear-eyed, and beautifully told examination of Ian Stevenson, the psychiatrist whose investigations into reincarnation and other anomalies remain some of the most enigmatic in modern science. A fascinating and wonderfully humane read.”
-- Paul Bloom, author of Psych: The Story of the Human Mind
