Book Review Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David M. Eagleman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'll stop short of calling this brilliant but perhaps I shouldn't.  In the forty tales, I only shook my head at the idea Eagleman was stretching once or twice and that's perhaps the highest praise I can give to a book that exists solely as an imaginative, philosophical stretch.


I hear tell, though, some of the stories have been done before, a blatant rip-off of Neil Gaiman here, a Benjamin Button-like tale there, but to decry Eagleman's original and inspiring work as derivative and insipid would be going too far.   I'll deem it "origative," perhaps.  Certainly it was a book that made me think, reflect, smile, frown and cock my head to the side in a contemplative fog more than once.  Sum is full of touching moments and more tangential insights than should be legal in such a minimalist work.


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