Sum Forty tales from the afterlives

Review by New York Times Review

WHEN it comes to theories of the afterlife, most of the world's major religions have fairly prosaic stuff on offer. Only occasionally will a cosmology be really colorful, as it is in Greek mythology, where some interesting eschatological options are available. Why there should be such a failure of the imagination on this topic is an interesting question. Perhaps we feel uncomfortable in such speculation? Perhaps we feel that it's a waste of time to talk about something people have very fixed ideas about - or dismiss as simply wishful thinking? But speculating about who, if anyone, created us and what lies ahead of us can be intellectually engaging and, as David Eagleman shows in his new book, "Sum," very entertaining too. The author, a neuroscientist with literary leanings, has set out a series of possibilities for the afterlife, described in 40 vignettes, each of which presents a different explanation of who God is and why he or she (or, in some cases, they) chose to create us, and what might be planned for us on our demise. And, for the most part, these intentions are very different from what conventional religion would have us believe. Most of these future options are extremely amusing, highlighting our self-importance and subjecting us to an astonishing range of humiliations, disappointments and surprises. If you are thinking of dying, this book may not exactly increase your peace of mind. Consider some of Eagleman's playfully inventive possibilities. One is that we are, in fact, immense beings tasked with the physically demanding job of maintaining and upholding the cosmos. However, God entitles us to a vacation from time to time, and this we take as tiny, insignificant human beings, born into a resort called Earth. While here, we enjoy parochial pleasures, interesting ourselves in very small matters like watching movies, falling in love and so on. At the end of our lives, we return to work, terribly disappointed to be leaving our tiny earthly bodies. Strange enough? Well, here's another possibility. "There are three deaths," Eagleman writes. "The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time." In this scheme, when we die, we go to a cosmic waiting room where we mark time until our name is never again mentioned. The famous are trapped here, of course, for a very long time; they wish for obscurity, but it may take an eternity to arrive. HOW about another afterlife, in which God is a microbe whose real concern is the battles and triumphs of other microbes? Our problem here is that we are simply too big. Our fate is irrelevant to the real show, which is the one in which microbes participate. 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, as in the final essay, where death leads to our lives being lived backward. 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. Alexander McCall Smith's most recent book, in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, is "Tea Time for the Traditionally Built."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

---

Review by Booklist Review

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.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Neuroscientist Eagleman's (www.eagleman.com) highly acclaimed 2009 story collection features 40 brief imaginings about mortality and immortality, the meaning of life and death, beginnings and endings, and the nature of God and the cosmos. Some are witty, others are whimsical; all are glimpses into the maelstrom of human hopes and fears. A dozen top-notch narrators including Brian Eno, Miranda Richardson, Dominic West, Stephen Fry, and the author provide a variety of reading styles. Small bites of food for thought light enough for very short commutes and ideal for lovers of literary fiction, philosophy, or metaphysics.-Janet Martin, Southern Pines P.L., NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

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 in line. 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. Egalitaire In 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 o Excerpted from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---