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Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives Paperback – July 10, 2001
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All across the globe, small children spontaneously speak of previous lives, beg to be taken “home,” pine for mothers and husbands and mistresses from another life, and know things that there seems to be no normal way for them to know. From the moment these children can talk, they speak of people and events from the past—not vague stories of centuries ago, but details of specific, identifiable individuals who may have died just months, weeks, or even hours before the birth of the child in question.
For thirty-seven years, Dr. Ian Stevenson has traveled the world from Lebanon to suburban Virginia investigating and documenting more than two thousand of these past life memory cases. Now, his essentially unknown work is being brought to the mainstream by Tom Shroder, the first journalist to have the privilege of accompanying Dr. Stevenson in his fieldwork. Shroder follows Stevenson into the lives of children and families touched by this phenomenon, changing from skeptic to believer as he comes face-to-face with concrete evidence he cannot discount in this spellbinding and true story.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJuly 10, 2001
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.8 x 8.38 inches
- ISBN-100684851938
- ISBN-13978-0684851938
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Editorial Reviews
Review
-Chicago Tribune
"Fascinating...This is science....This book explodes the worldview we know and demands that we enlarge our perspective."
-Claire Douglas Rocky Mountain News
"A book worth reading, if only for the many unsettling questions it will raise."
-Patti Thorn Rocky Mountain News
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Question
It is late, nearly lightless. Smoke from a million dung fires hangs in the headlights as the Maruti microbus bangs along the narrow, cratered hardpack that passes for a paved road in the Indian outback. We are still hours away from the hotel, an island of First World comfort in this simmering Third World ocean, and the possibility that we will never get there looms as large as the oncoming truck, absurdly overloaded and undermaintained, shuddering violently as it hurtles toward us dead in the middle of the road. Using every inch of the rutted dirt shoulder, we barely escape. Through the thin tin of the Maruti, I can feel the truck vibrate, smell death in the exhaust pumping from its tailpipe. In escape, there is no relief. We bounce back onto the road’s pitted surface and immediately overtake a wooden cart lumbering to the heavy gait of yoked oxen with immense horns. Our driver leans on his horn as he swerves around the cart into a blind curve that I can only pray is not occupied by a bus loaded to the dented metal ceiling with humans and farm animals. I try not to think about the lack of seat belts or the mere half inch of glass and metal that separates the front seat from whatever we plow into—or the Lonely Planet article I read that said fatal accidents were forty times more likely on Indian roads than on American highways. Or the account of a Western traveler who hired a car and driver in northern India, exactly as we have, only to crash head on into a truck, then regain consciousness in agony in a crude hospital, stripped of passport, money belt, and insurance papers. I try not to think about dying ten thousand miles from home, about never seeing my wife and children again, about their lives going on without any trace of me. I try not to think about absolute darkness.
But even within my bubble of fear, I am aware of the irony. Sitting in the backseat, apparently unconcerned about the two-ton mud-splattered torpedoes racing toward us, is a tall, white-haired man, nearly eighty, who insists that he has compiled enough solid, empirical evidence to demonstrate that physical death is not necessarily the end of me or anyone else.
His name is Ian Stevenson, and he is a physician and psychiatrist who has been braving roads like this and worse for thirty-seven years to bring back reports of young children who speak of remembering previous lives and provide detailed and accurate information about people who died before they were born, people they say they once were. While I struggle with my fear of dying, he is wrestling with his own fear of annihilation: that his life’s work will end, largely ignored by his peers.
“Why,” he asks for the third time since night has fallen, “do mainstream scientists refuse to accept the evidence we have for reincarnation?”
On this day, and for the past six months, Stevenson has shown me what he means by “evidence.” He has permitted me to accompany him on field trips, first to the hills surrounding Beirut and now on a wide swath of India. He has responded to my endless questions and even invited me to participate in the interviews that are the heart of his research. The evidence he is referring to does not come from fashionable New Age sources, past-life readings, or hypnotic regressions during which subjects talk about being a Florentine bride in the sixteenth century or a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, rendering the kind of details one might garner in an hour’s time paging through a few romance novels. The details Stevenson’s children recall are far more homely and more specific than those. One remembers being a teenager called Sheila who was hit by a car crossing the road to collect grass for cattle feed, another recalls the life of a young man who died of tuberculosis asking for his brother, a third remembers being a woman waiting for heart surgery in Virginia, trying and failing to call her daughter before the operation she would not survive. It goes on and on: These children supply names of towns and relatives, occupations and relationships, attitudes and emotions that, in hundreds of cases around the world, are unique to a single dead individual, often apparently unknown to their present families. But the fact is, the people the children remember did exist, the memories that the children claim can be checked against real lives and their alleged feats of identification verified—or contradicted— by a variety of witnesses.
This is what Stevenson has been doing for almost forty years; it is what we have been doing in Lebanon and India: examining records, interviewing witnesses, and measuring the results against possible alternative explanations. I have seen close up, as few others have, how compelling some of these cases can be—and not just factually, but in the emotion visible in the eyes and the voices of the subjects, their families, and the families of the people they claim to have been. I have seen and heard astonishing things, things for which I have no easy explanation.
Now we are near the end of our last trip together, perhaps the last trip of Stevenson’s career. It dawns on me in the noisy chill of the microbus, droning and rattling through the night, that Stevenson’s question is not rhetorical. He is asking me, the outsider, the skeptical journalist who has seen what he has to show, to explain. How can scientists, professed to hold no dogma that reasonable evidence cannot overturn, ignore the volumes of reasonable evidence that he has provided?
I begin to go into some long riff about how, in the absence of any knowledge about the mechanism of the transfer—the means by which personality, identity, and memory can be reassigned from one body to another—it is hard to talk about proof. But then I stop cold. I hear myself rambling, and realize what he is really asking: After all I have seen and heard, do I, at least, believe?
I, who have always felt mortality in my marrow, who have stared inward but never seen a ripple nor heard a whisper of any life but my own, who have seen people near to me disappear into death with an awesome and unappealable finality and learned in my flesh, where it counts, that the only thing abiding is an unyielding sense of diminishment. What do I think?
He wants to know. He is asking me. He deserves an answer.
Product details
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster (July 10, 2001)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0684851938
- ISBN-13 : 978-0684851938
- Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.38 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #108,486 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #144 in Reincarnation (Books)
- #178 in New Age Mysticism (Books)
- #206 in Unexplained Mysteries (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
CONTACT TOM SHRODER OR READ HIS BLOG AT TOMSHRODER.COM
FOLLOW TOM ON TWITTER @TOMSHRODER
Tom Shroder is an award-winning journalist, editor, and author. His most recent book, "The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of My Family," an investigation into the life of his grandfather, Pulitzer Prize winning author MacKinlay Kantor. Book critic Susan Cheever said, "In writing a history that is also a meditation on writing, Shroder has created a book that is as useful as it is fascinating." Shroder is also the author of "Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal," selected as a Washington Post notable book of 2014. His earlier book, the best-selling "Old Souls," is a classic study of the intersection between mysticism and science.
Shroder is also co-author, with former oil rig captain John Konrad, of "Fire on the Horizon,the Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster." Sebastian Junger, author of "War" and "The Perfect Storm," says of Fire on the Horizon, "It's one of the best disaster books I've ever read.. . I tore through it like a novel, but with the queasy knowledge that the whole damn thing is true. A phenomenal feat of journalism."
As editor of The Washington Post Magazine, he conceived and edited two Pulitzer Prize-winning feature stories. His most recent editing project, "Overwhemed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time," by Brigid Schulte, was a New York Times bestseller.
In addition to being an author and editor of narrative journalism, Shroder is one of the foremost editors of humor in the country. He has edited humor columns by Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten and Tony Kornheiser, as well as conceived and launched the internationally syndicated comic strip, Cul de Sac, by Richard Thompson. With humorist Barry and novelists Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard, he concocted and edited "Naked Came the Manatee," a satirical serial novel.
Shroder was born in New York City in 1954, the son of a novelist and a builder, and the grandson of MacKinlay Kantor, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his civil war novel "Andersonville." Shroder attended the University of Florida where he became Editor of the 22,000 circulation student daily newspaper despite the fact that he was an anthropology major (an affront for which the university's journalism faculty was slow to forgive him). After graduation in 1976, he wrote national award-winning features for the Fort Myers News Press, the Tallahassee Democrat, The Cincinnati Enquirer and the Miami Herald. At the Herald he became editor of Tropic magazine, which earned two Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure.
Shroder is also known for his creation, along with Barry and Weingarten, of the Tropic Hunt, which has become the Herald Hunt in Miami and the Post Hunt in Washington, a mass-participation puzzle attended by thousands each year.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book interesting and well-written. They appreciate the insightful case studies and research presented in the book. Readers find the book credible and well-researched. However, some feel the travel content is too detailed and lacks clear explanations.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book an engaging read that keeps their attention until the end. They appreciate the writing style and find it fascinating, with amazing information about past lives.
"...This was a fascinating read." Read more
"...2. Shroder's writing style makes the journey well worth the read. 3. Evidence presented from the children's testimonies often raised my eyebrows...." Read more
"...This book is keeping my interest, and I think I will finish it through to the end and feel like I have really learned something afterward...." Read more
"...It's an interesting read. Certainly compelling. It didn't change my mind on the subject, but I still enjoyed the stories told within." Read more
Customers find the book insightful and interesting. It provides an excellent view into reincarnation research and how skeptics tend to criticize it. The case studies are intriguing and make readers want to read more about reincarnation. Readers appreciate the thoughtful memoir about traveling with Dr. Ian.
"...It provides an excellent view into the research, and how & why the skeptics tend to rip it apart." Read more
"...The topic is interesting at the least and deserving of continuing exploration...." Read more
"...Yes. Would I recommend it? Yes. Did it present facts as facts and postulates as postulates? Yes. Personal likes - 1...." Read more
"...however, is not terribly strong, many of the cases and incidents are indeed very intriguing, but the sparsity leaves a great deal to be desired...." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's writing style. They find it well-written and honest, with vivid descriptions of the places the author visits. The author is generous in sharing his own emotional experiences.
"...My only complaint was that I felt the color, while well written, was padding. I found myself scanning through those sections looking for “the meat.”" Read more
"...He describes what he sees in vivid detail, and he also is generous in sharing his own emotional reactions and insights into what he sees...." Read more
"...related to reincarnation, there are practically three paragraphs covering completely mundane and utterly useless personal opinions unrelated to the..." Read more
"...I think the author is a very good writer. Contrary to what another reviewer said, it never occurred to me that he was "whining."..." Read more
Customers find the book credible and serious. They say it contains many interviews substantiating the belief of reincarnation. The stories sound true to them and are interesting to read about. Readers appreciate the author's research and honesty.
"...book to anyone interested in spirituality in general, and more specifically reincarnation...." Read more
"...From what I could tell, Stevenson pulled no punches and told no lies. Worth the read." Read more
"I believe in reincarnation. The stories here sound true to me. The varieties of cases are interesting to read about...." Read more
"...Some amazing stuff and gives strong proof that past lives / reincarnation is a possibility." Read more
Customers find the book in good condition and well-researched.
"good condition" Read more
"...Further, I received it quickly after order and in perfect condition." Read more
"great book, great condition" Read more
"Fascinating and Well Researced..." Read more
Customers have different views on the travel content. Some find it enjoyable, with descriptions of Stephanson's journey to different countries and interviews. Others feel the book lacks clear information and gets too technical at times.
"...I enjoyed the descriptions of the travels and the people who believe in the subject...." Read more
"...that I've come away with from this book is that investigating these cases is astonishingly tedious and the idea that Stevenson has accumulated some..." Read more
"...The author and Mr. Stephanson went through an unbelievable journey to different countries to interview countless number of families...." Read more
"...-visited, etc - it just did not hold my attention as the author went into too much detail about things that were not really important to the story I..." Read more
Customers find the book boring and difficult to read. They mention it's poorly expressed and filled with irrelevant details.
"I am having a little difficulty staying interested while reading this book...." Read more
"...I find the writing ponderous, poorly expressed, and even boring." Read more
"...on reincarnation and he therefore had to pad it with fluff and irrelevant minutia...." Read more
"Boring! Too much about the travel and descriptions of the areas he was seeing...." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2005First, I have to say that several of the reviewers have said that somewhere on the cover it was stated that this book provided PROOF of reincarnation, and they then rated this book poorly for not providing such iron-clad proof. After reading these reviews, I studied the cover once again, trying to find where it states that any proof will be given - yet, there's no such statement ANYWHERE! What it states is that they will provide "compelling evidence" - and in my opinion they have achieved this goal.
"Old Souls" discusses some of those cases suggestive of reincarnation that Dr. Ian Stephenson had investigated during his career. These cases are found all over the world, but this book tends to discuss only those found in Lebanon, India, and a few in the US. Much of the info. provided tends to be clinical in a sense, but one has to remember that Dr. Stephenson is trying to pursue this from a scientific point of view - in an effort to bring this sort of research into the mainstream.
The author, Thomas Shroder, is a journalist skeptic who followed Dr. Stephenson on the last few of his journeys. I must say that it's hard at times to read how the skeptics view the evidence, as it seems to show without a doubt the saying that believers don't need extraordinary proof, but to the skeptic, no proof is good enough. However, by the end, this skeptic was at least left wondering - not willing to deny everything he saw and heard - at least thats a start...
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in spirituality in general, and more specifically reincarnation. It provides an excellent view into the research, and how & why the skeptics tend to rip it apart.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2010...from the core subject and consider now how the information was gathered. Normally you'd think research to be dull - plodding through libraries, speaking to hundreds of people and cross-checking the results.
What Tom Schroder's book does is show the dangerous side to this work as well. What do you do when a village of angry men show up to an interview? How do you track down that elusive autopsy report when the bureaucrats are corrupt, indifferent or simply overwhelmed by wars and civil unrest? How do you keep going when a journey of 40 miles can take six hours due to appalling traffic conditions?
Old Souls tells the story behind the story, the dedication of one man, Dr Ian Stevenson, to present evidence of reincarnation that is scrupulously meticulous as well as rigorously investigated and documented. Sometimes a scientific pursuit is not pretty but Schroder has been honest about all the conditions, including his own self doubts.
This was a fascinating read.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2024I personally found this book very interesting. It delves into personalities claiming memories of past lives, sometimes with uncanny accuracy and sometimes with vague memories. Throughout the world there are populaces that embrace reincarnation while others totally reject the idea as absurd. For years, Dr. Ian Stevenson has expended countless hours and energy in trying to establish a foothold in the mainstream scientific community. The author of this work accompanied him on several trips and independently sought answers to the existence or nonexistence o of reincarnation. The topic is interesting at the least and deserving of continuing exploration. For me, many questions remain unanswered and yet there is definitely some factor that causes me to feel uneasy about entirely dismissing the existence of reincarnation. As with much in life, the answer may never definitively reveal itself.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2024I appreciate Shroder’s frank discussion of skepticism bashing against inexplicable observations of children recalling previous lives. Near the end [way too close to the end] he briefly dips into how quantum consciousness could be involved and the difficulties of 3-dimension beings [us] experiencing a 4-dimension reality, could contribute to understanding the phenomenon. These are not his field of expertise and complex subjects to both research and try to explain, so I can’t fault him for not dipping more deeply.
It is an easy to read narrative. My only complaint was that I felt the color, while well written, was padding. I found myself scanning through those sections looking for “the meat.”
Top reviews from other countries
-
Anna Gil BardajiReviewed in Spain on November 4, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfecto
Mejor de lo que esperaba!
- SoniaReviewed in Australia on July 26, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Spiritual book
Excellent book, very interesting for those that like learning about our spiritual side. Couldn’t recommend this more, one of my favorites
- SiusaidhReviewed in Canada on June 26, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating book
Had I known this book is an account by someone who accompanied Dr. Ian Stevenson on his last two research trips (to Lebanon and India), I would have bought it long ago. Shroder engagingly maintains a good balance between skepticism and qualified belief which should be valued by anyone who has ever considered whether 'souls' survive bodily death. Dr. Stevenson's heroic efforts to scientifically investigate the best evidence we have that reincarnation is real should be much more widely appreciated.
- Amazon CustomerReviewed in India on February 22, 2016
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Excellent Book... everyone should read it atleast once in their life team
- Koriel TannhauserReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 22, 2012
5.0 out of 5 stars Old Souls
This book actually provides a good introduction to the work of Dr. Stevenson, who collected thousands of cases of children who spontaneously (without hypnosis) remember their own past lives. He methodically documents each child's statements of a previous life and identifies the deceased person the child remembers being.
For Westerners the idea that some children (age three to five) not only remember a previous existence, but can identify loved ones from it, is quite bizarre. Those kinds of "memories" are not very detailed ones, it's more like memories from your early childhood - you remember only some fragments, mostly associated with some important/significant/unusual events at that time. And this is one of the points that make those kinds of memories (from past life), quite real.
According to Stevenson, the orthodox theory (and it is just a theory) conceives human personality as the product of a person's genetic material inherited from his ancestors through his parents (influences of his prenatal and postnatal environment). But that theory cannot fully explain early childhood phobias, some of the abilities that seem to develop spontaneously, or even children convinced that they are the wrong sex. But if one accepts the possibility of reincarnation, one can entertain the idea that these children are demonstrating strong likes, dislikes, skills, and even genius that are the logical results of previous experiences. There again you will find cases of children acting as if they did not belong in their families (they treat parents and siblings with indifference, even hostility). This phenomenon is usually thought to have been caused by infantile trauma. In some cases, it could be so. But in other cases, it could be some kind of "left overs" from the "old life".
Difficult to believe? For some, maybe. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who wonders about things like that. This book doesn't give you 100% answer, but it's a start in the right direction. Another point to consider is that almost nobody (in the "Western" world) is bold enough to talk to a small child about something like that (lack of time, lack of interest, fear of unknown, lack of belief - reason for that could be anything). And because of that, those memories are nearly always forgotten by adulthood (this can be attributed to lack of memory rehearsal; as very young children do not usually engage in rehearsal of remembered information, except very specific ones such as fire can cause pain and so on). Which gives another really good question: why would you want to remember? Sure, one reason could be that it is some kind of "proof" that "something" is there, on the other side - that the human soul lives on. But most of us seems to "knows" that (or subconsciously "feel" that) anyway.
It seems like on one hand, the whole process of forgetting past life makes sense: all your friends from the other life are most likely gone, all the love ones too, your have new memories now, new life, new future - so why would you want to remember it (most likely it would drive you crazy after a while anyway)? There is not point in that - it's much better to "wipe the slate clean" (so to speak) and start over a new life again. From this point of view, this whole process seems to be a very naturalistic phenomenon.
On the other, it doesn't in the way that, in the new life you are probably going to make the same mistakes again (or quite similar) as you did in the old one. Sure, you will also make some different choices too (after all it will be a different life), but mistakes will happen. You will have to learn similar basic things/feelings again: how to write, speak, how to hate, love and so on. I just don't see, how in this case, the so called "soul" can actually learn something - by repeating almost everything again, without remembering some "bad choices and mistakes" from the other "old life". The life will be new, but feelings (such as love, hate, pain, anger, wonder, or various emotions associated with mood, temperament, and personality), will be pretty much the same. But then again, maybe it's all about something different than just "learning".
Anyway, for somebody who is interested in such subjects, this is a good book to start. It doesn't give you all the answers to the above, no book can do that, but it is close enough to put you on the right track. The other recommended books, 2 of them written by Stevenson himself, would be: "Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation", "Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect" and "Yesterday's Children: The Search for My Family from the Past" by Jenny Cockell (or even go for something like "Lake of Memory Rising" - by William R. Fix).