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Loading... Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (original 2009; edition 2009)by David Eagleman
Work detailsSum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman (2009)
Sum is a collection of 40 essays about what the Afterlife might look like. For example, in his title story Sum, everyone gets a chance to relive their lives, except with a different order, where similar activities are grouped together. So, you would spend 10 years straight just sleeping, or 5 days brushing your teeth and WAY too many days browsing on goodreads (but it would be fun!). His essays are so quirky and refreshingly creative - definitely food for thought. (  ) jmoncton | Jun 3, 2013 |  Imaginative, humorous, profound. Don't read this all in one sitting, read one or two of these short pieces at a time. (  ) nmele | Apr 6, 2013 | Forty "what if" scenarios regarding the afterlife. These short tales are funny, quirky, and sure to spark your imagination. I immediately felt the urge to reread my favorites, and quote them to friends. ( ) hayduke | Apr 3, 2013 | I enjoyed this book OK. Although I greatly admire Eagleman's creativity and expert writing, I found many of the vignettes so complex as to be boring. There is talk of quarks and atoms. It's the vignettes that are more reader friendly that make this book a joy to read. ( ) Caroline77 | Apr 1, 2013 | Loved the inventiveness and humour in these vignettes, all looking at how an afterlife might work. The 'recreators' one where people's lives are reconstructed in the afterlife from their traces in the records they leave behind was particularly resonant for an archivist! ( ) AJBraithwaite | Mar 31, 2013 |
 Eagleman will find Sum a hard act to follow. 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. The best stories in Sum remind us that it is natural to want to know our place in the scheme of things. The book is a scripture of sorts, but because each myth contradicts the last, it is not a dogmatic collection.  Yet while Mr. Eagleman squeezes from his tales a trite message about life, his many passing observations -- especially those concerning time and space -- convey sharp insights about how we think about death. 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.
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0307377342, Hardcover)SUM is a dazzling exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered–each presented as a vignette that offers us a stunning lens through which to see ourselves here and now.In one afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures who built us to figure out what they could not. In a different version of the afterlife you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple struggling with discontent, or that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember, or that the hereafter includes the thousands of previous gods who no longer attract followers. In some afterlives you are split into your different ages; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been; in others you are re-created from your credit card records and Internet history. David Eagleman proposes many versions of our purpose here; we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers, we are reunions for a scattered confederacy of atoms, we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what makes couples stick together. These wonderfully imagined tale–at once funny, wistful, and unsettling–are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that exposes radiant new facets of our humanity. (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Apr 2011 03:59:57 -0400) "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" -- Publishers Weekly.… (more) (summary from another edition) |
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