Book Review: Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot (2009). Bruce & Andrea Leininger.

Soul Survivor is the story of a modern boy from Texas who had detailed and accurate memories of life and death as a World War II fighter pilot, starting with terrifying dreams at night of burning up and falling that began before he even learned to talk. 

This was the first account I had read about the strange and widespread phenomenon of small children with apparent memories of past lives.  It is considered by experts in this field to be one of the most thoroughly researched and documented of thousands of these cases that have been collected and studied now for more than 70 years. 

It is also very powerfully told, through the experiences of the child’s parents, as they began to piece together the meaning of what their son was saying to them and doing in his early childhood, and then slowly validated dozens of specific factual statements made by their son about his memories of his previous life as a young fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, despite their own resistance to accepting as true what they were hearing from him, and their own religious discomfort at the outset with the whole idea of reincarnation.

Most of the books I have read by now on this topic concern the work of two eminent psychiatrists at the University of Virginia Medical School, Dr. Ian Stevenson (who began the study of this phenomenon in the 1970s, and worked on it throughout his long career there, traveling all over the world to gather case histories from different cultures), and Dr. Jim Tucker, who began as a student of Stevenson’s, then became an expert on the subject in his own right. 

Between the two of them, they continuously collected and studied thousands of case histories from around the world for more than fifty years.  Many of those cases, which they gathered with meticulous care under research protocols originally developed by Stevenson to screen out falsification and bias, are considered “solved”, which means they believe with a high degree of certainty that they have identified the past life (the person) to which the child subject refers, even though those people were not typically public figures or celebrities that would likely have been known to the child or the family involved.

The boy and family in Soul Survivor were not among their many astonishing cases, but as a starting point for reading about and understanding the phenomenon of children who remember past lives, it is excellent – moving, almost like a novel in style and persuasive enough to make you want to know more about it.  Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (2021). Steven Johnson.

Steven Johnson is one of my favorite writers on the history of science, and this book is definitely up to his usual standards.   Although he does delve into some of the same topics of contemporary research and prospects for life extension addressed in Dr. David Sinclair's book Lifespan, which I previously reviewed, this book is primarily about the history of how whole populations have begun to live longer lives, and indeed, how we have doubled human lifespans in the past century. 

During most of human existence, including prehistoric times, ancient civilizations, the Dark Ages, and all the way up through the Renaissance, it doesn’t appear that human lifespans grew very much.  Indeed, by using and explaining some of the research and statistical methods that have been used to guess at population longevity from before the time of censuses and population health record-keeping, Johnson shows that even when average lifespans grew slightly longer in the past, they were also likely to grow shorter again with regularity as a result of plagues, famines and other natural causes. 

In the past two centuries, though, a series of innovations that you might not have assumed would help many people live longer have indeed begun to do so.  Johnson describes how these innovations (such as public plumbing systems, clean water systems, vaccines, seat belts, refrigeration and better food distribution) have each played a role in adding years to our life expectancy.  

This is a timely reminder in the years of the pandemic how much benefit science (and the scientific method), enlightened public policy and rising prosperity have played in giving us all the  expectation of an “extra life” worth of time to live.  It’s very enjoyable and informative; this is science history at its best and most accessible. 

Extra Life has also been accompanied by a four-part PBS Mini-series of the same name, which I haven’t yet seen.  Highly recommended.     

Personal Notes: About Mysteries of Life

In this blog's Topics list, you will now see a new item called "Mysteries of Life". 

 

The sorts of topics to be included and discussed in my Mysteries of Life section are those that deal with aspects of the "paranormal".   Some will disparage and dismiss these topics as new age, mystical, pseudo-scientific, hocus-pocus, fantasy, or otherwise just absurd within the modern scientific and rationalist worldview.  I understand that reaction and that skepticism, and am quite sympathetic to it.  Skepticism is a necessary part of any rational thought.

 

I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories, organized religions, cults, magical thinking, or other non-rational and unscientific belief systems.  I am a strong believer in reason, logic, and the scientific method, which over the past five hundred years have given us a powerful set of tools for evaluating, testing, proving and disproving ideas about the reality we inhabit, through a process of repeatable and peer-reviewed experimentation. 

 

With that said, though, I have occasionally stumbled onto well-documented facts and events, and even had a few personal experiences, that challenged aspects of the scientific and materialist consensus as well as my own beliefs, and raised disturbing questions that are not easily explained by our current understanding of "objective" reality.

 

Two such evolving stories that have particularly caught my attention in recent years are the strange reports of many young children around the world who appear to have detailed and often-verifiable memories of recent past lives; and the newly-rehabilitated status of the UFO phenomenon, which had been denied and ridiculed by the U.S. government for three generations, only to be suddenly acknowledged and confirmed a few years ago by that same government, after the New York Times reported on a series of encounters between UFOs and a U.S. Navy carrier task force that were witnessed and recorded by many of the pilots, officers and sailors who were there when it happened.

 

After starting down this road, I also noticed that once I had begun to delve into the history and scientific study of these two particular areas of investigation, I soon discovered other types of curious phenomena and widely reported psychological and paranormal experiences that seemed to be similar, or at least somehow related. 

 

One possibility to explain this proliferation of weirdness is that once you head down the rabbit hole of giving any credence to the paranormal, you'll inevitably be drawn deeper into it, much like other forms of irrational belief and madness.  But it is also conceivable that there are real common threads or unknown forces involved in many of these unexplained mysteries.  These perceived similarities between different paranormal phenomena often seem to suggest the same need to probe our limited understanding of the true nature of our human minds (as distinct from our brains), and our consciousness and perceptions.

 

For example, I recently discovered that the phenomenon of the Near Death Experience (NDEs), when studied in a scientific manner across a large data set of patient reports, raises many of the same sorts of age-old questions of mind, body and soul, and of space and time, as are found in attempts to understand the meaning of accounts of apparent reincarnation, or of UFOs and reported alien encounters. 

 

Meanwhile, some of our contemporary physicists, still looking for a grand unified theory of existence, suggest with increasing frequency that quantum physics, and its postulation of an endless multiverse determined by consciousness, choice and observation, may offer explanations for some of the paranormal phenomena that have been reported recently, and throughout most of recorded history for that matter.  What are we to make of that?

 

It may be that none of these questions can ever be convincingly answered, explained or proven.  I'm very open to that possibility.  But the process of documenting and cataloguing strange facts and events, the study of puzzling and often traumatic or transformative experiences many people have reported that don't seem to be "normal", and the search for greater knowledge and understanding of these odd phenomena, is still intriguing to me. 

 

Therefore, I will occasionally report on good books, movies and TV shows by and about people who are exploring "mysteries of life" from a scientific and academic perspective.  The more we can know about what's really going on in these lives, minds and world of ours, the better, don't you think?  And besides, it's fun!  Who doesn't love a good eerie mystery?

Movie Review: Enola Holmes (2020). Netflix.

This lightly amusing historical period piece and mystery stars young Millie Bobby Brown (of Stranger Things fame) in the leading role.  

As Sherlock Holmes' little sister Enola, a feisty and non-compliant teenage girl, she goes into the family business, as a means of escaping the oppressive plans and domesticated female role their older brother (as her guardian) has made for her.  

Nicely outfitted with the latest in Edwardian fashion and surrounded by English period sets and scenery, young Enola helps win the battle for women's suffrage in Britain, while freeing herself from repressive social expectations, and tracking down the beloved but unconventional mother who had abandoned her. 

Of course, there are plenty of other mysteries to solve, plots to uncover and prevent, and brilliant Holmes-ish detective work throughout.  Recommended.

Book Review: The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder (2019). Sean McFate.

McFate, a PhD military theorist and former U.S. Army warrior, argues for a radical renewal of American strategic thought, that recognizes that the World War II and Cold War view of warfare as encompassing only "conventional war" between nation-states equipped with expensive technology such as the F-35 fighter and aircraft carriers (the Tom Clancy approach, as he calls it) is obsolete, and does not address most emerging military threats.  

He discusses the paradox of how every American military venture since World War II has ended in political and strategic failure, despite the fact that American combat units almost "never lose a battle", whether in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.  

He proposes some unorthodox solutions, including creation of an American Foreign Legion (AFL);  use of mercenaries and AFL for limited war, as opposed to maintaining a large standing military; and use of shadow war, cyberwar and other hidden means of political persuasion and enforcement.  He also strongly endorses the idea of robust diplomatic organizations and non-lethal means of influencing others, whether state or non-state actors.  

This important work contains many interesting and thought-provoking ideas on war and the military in the emerging 21st century geopolitical landscape, some of which may have immediate relevance to the unfolding war in Ukraine.  Recommended.

Book Review: Madame Fourcade's Secret War (2019). Lynne Olson.

This biography by Lynne Olson, who in recent years has become a prolific and very readable World War II historian, tells another story of a woman whose role in the war was little known until recently, but who played an important role in fighting the Germans, and contributing to the ultimate Allied victory.  

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was an upper-class young Frenchwoman who worked closely with a French intelligence leader just before the war, and with him set up one of the largest and most effective French spy networks early in the war, before the German invasion of France.  The two of them also made contact with British intelligence, and became one of the British government's  earliest and most important sources for information from within occupied France. 

However, in the period after the German invasion, her boss was lost, leaving Madame Fourcade in charge of the network, despite the fact that she was only 31 years old, and a woman, on the run with two small children from whom she ultimately had to be separated for much of the war. 

The rest of the book details how she managed to keep the network alive, rebuild it as members were captured or killed, repeatedly dodge capture herself despite a steep price on her head, win the trust of the men serving under her as well as leaders of other networks and the British, and navigate the dangerous politics of occupation-era France, as she steered her organization between the Vichy collaborationist authorities, the Gaullists and the Communist resistance groups.  

A very well-written and interesting account of one of the greatest resistance leaders and spies in wartime France.  Recommended.

Book Review: Recursion (2020). Brian Crouch.

This is the second novel by Crouch that approaches the question of multiple universes and timelines, but this time from the standpoint of neuroscience and memory. 

In this story, the mechanism for traversing multiple lives lived (or periods of lives) has to do with an invention that allows a person to jump back to a point in their memory where something emotional happened, and then restart their lifetime story from that point, but with their old memories intact (thus allowing them to consciously make different decisions, and become different people). 

The "life loop" is a plot that has been similarly explored in other stories.  Groundhog Day is probably the most famous example in film (with its very short "one-day" timeline loop), but it is also the basis for two earlier sci-fi novels which I highly recommend, Replay (1986), by Ken Grimwood, and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), by Claire North. 

This book is another worthy contribution to the time loop literary tradition, but one in which there is more effort made to come up with a technological explanation for what is happening to the characters.  That focuses more attention on the wider problem of the unintended consequences of the new technologies we humans keep inventing, and the massively destructive effects they can have on our happiness and social stability.  Recommended.

Book Review: Orfeo (2014). Richard Powers.

This is the most difficult and complex Richard Powers novel I've read so far.   It tells the story of Peter Els, a now 70-year-old loner and musical composer (of classical music) who has spent his adult life trying to create a piece of music of surpassing and universal truth. 

 

Through scenes looking back to different stages of Peter's adult life, we see a number of separate threads of his personal story, including his first great love in college, a failed marriage to another woman, an often-destructive collaboration and friendship with a strange dancer and dramatist, and his troubled experience as a mostly absent parent to a daughter. 

 

Along the way, we also are exposed to deep discussions of music and music theory, the history of 20th century classical music and various trends in academic criticism of it, and an interwoven set of political themes about repressive technologies, authoritarianism and the social damage of the war on terror.  

 

Looming dangerously in the background of this complicated stew of ideas and events is yet another plot-line about the accidental discovery of his amateur experiments with home-brew DNA manipulation (in his quest for a new musical form), and his eventual pursuit by a bioterrorism-obsessed police force and a hysterical internet-fueled post-9/11 public.  It definitely held my attention, but at times it seemed like there was just too much going on to follow it all.  

 

At the end, the main question I had from reading this book, which was deeply relevant to me, was: what is the point of composing and creating new music, when there is already so much of it freely available to anyone, and where for most musicians, there is so little chance that many people will ever hear or appreciate the product of all their hard work and creative obsessions?  For that matter, why is anyone driven to make art if there’s no likely probability of recognition or reward for it?

 

It’s an enduring mystery of the musical mind and the creative soul, and of our own times, as explored by one of our greatest contemporary novelists.  Recommended.