Are These Children Cases of Reincarnation

Amazon.com Review
As our understanding and awareness of who and what we are advances through the grueling gauntlet of scientific process, we continually face a debilitating dilemma: we must simultaneously question everything and at the same time proceed as if we know something. As a result we continually battle ourselves, questioning the ground on which we stand while using that same ground to prove our questions irrelevant. It's a gift, then, when a writer emerges who will grapple with any of these battles at the event horizon between science and conjecture and take himself wholly into the fray, reporting back to us the subtle forces at work within the storm and how those forces play upon him and the subject he explores.

In Old Souls, journalist Tom Shroder manages this feat and hands us a volume that is considerable and engaging. Not only do we explore the work of a brave and committed researcher on the slippery slope of reincarnation, we are also treated to a remarkable tour of worlds foreign to us: human existence in post-war Beirut and in the depths of poverty in India. Through the entire journey, Mr. Shroder keeps the primary question lively, carrying the reader through to a closing bit of personal memoir that brilliantly ties the book together into a provocative whole.
Whether you believe in reincarnation or not, you can't help but appreciate Mr. Shroder's disciplined, scrupulously fair, and soul-searching explication. Along the way, we learn immensely about the process as it is revealed and a great deal about exploration itself. The book works on many levels, and readers will benefit from them all. --Donald A. Freas --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
While it is easy for Western science to dismiss as fantasy or wish fulfillment the recollections of individuals who "remember" being Cleopatra or Napoleon, how is one to explain a young boy's insistence that he is really a nondescript auto mechanic who died in a car crash a few years before? American psychiatrist Ian Stevenson has spent more than 30 years studying the cases of some 2000 children who spontaneously remember concrete details about dead strangers whose experiences can be documented. On his two final field trips, to Lebanon and India, he was accompanied by journalist Shroder, Sunday Style editor of the Washington Post. Shroder's account of these expeditions emphasizes physical detail over in-depth analysis but nevertheless makes for engrossing reading. In many cases, the subjects exhibit birthmarks or extreme phobias corresponding to injuries or traumatic events in their "past lives." They recognize the deceased's relatives and friends; in one case, a Lebanese boy asked the deceased's mother if she had finished knitting the sweater she was making for him when he died. That the compelling questions raised by such cases are ignored by the scientific establishment causes Stevenson great disappointment. "For me," he claims, "everything now believed by scientists is open to question, and I am always dismayed to find that many scientists accept current knowledge as forever fixed." The journalistic objectivity Shroder brings to his material makes this an exceptionally valuable treatment of an often disparaged subject. Agent, Al Hart, Fox Chase Agency. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Shroder, an editor at the Washington Post, persuaded psychiatrist Ian Stevenson to take him along on six months of field research in Beirut, India, and America. The research involved tracking reports of children claiming to recall vivid details about a stranger who has lived before and possessing certain birthmarks related to that person's violent death, such as a bullet wound. When the historical data are matched, we have a mystery suggesting that old souls are reborn into new bodies. During 37 years of research, Stevenson has documented over 2500 alleged cases of reincarnation A evidence that has been ignored by mainstream science. Shroder has effectively captured some of Stevenson's work, but we are still left wondering about the mechanics of the transfer of identity and markings. For larger collections on reincarnation/paranormal studies. ALeo Kriz, West Des Moines Lib., IA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews
A bemused journalists firsthand report of his travels with an aging research scientist on arduous, often perilous journeys throughout Lebanon and India seeking to verify children’s claims of having lived previous lives. Shroder, a Washington Post editor, discovered Dr. Ian Stevenson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, while researching a piece on Dr. Brian Weiss, author of a book about a woman who, under hypnosis, claimed to have had several past lives. Unconvinced by Weisss evidence, Shroder turned to the work of Stevenson, who has spent nearly 40 years investigating claims of small children who spontaneously reported memories of prior existences. The first trip on which Shroder accompanied Stevenson was in 1997 to Lebanon, where Stevenson tracked down and reinterviewed subjects he had first studied some 16 years earlier. In 1998, the two traveled together to India on a similar mission. Stevenson, a researcher well versed in the scientific method, looked for flaws, discrepancies, and explainable coincidences in the stories he collected and meticulously measured birthmarks on living persons to compare them with trauma on the dead bodies of those whose souls the living believed now inhabited them. Shroder, whose journalistic background makes him a clear-eyed observer and brilliant reporter of his surroundings, provides unforgettable descriptions of living conditions amid the wreckage of once-prosperous Lebanon and the medieval filth and poverty of India. His stories of American children with possible past-life memories pale by comparison, as does his account of an odd happening in his own youth that shaped his thinking about life’s enigmas. Shroders conclusion is not that old souls are being reincarnated in new bodies; but, that the world is indeed a mysterious place and that we are all connected by forces beyond our understanding. While true believers will find much here to buttress their notions about the immortality of the human soul, skeptics will enjoy watching a trained scientist in his careful explorations of the inexplicable. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
Chicago Tribune Whether or not you believe, but especially if you're a born skeptic, you'll be in good company sharing the travels of author Tom Shroder....Old Souls is quietly mind-boggling. -- Review

Review
Claire Douglas Rocky Mountain News Fascinating...This is science....This book explodes the worldview we know and demands that we enlarge our perspective.

Patti Thorn Rocky Mountain News A book worth reading, if only for the many unsettling questions it will raise.

Chicago Tribune Whether or not you believe, but especially if you're a born skeptic, you'll be in good company sharing the travels of author Tom Shroder....Old Souls is quietly mind-boggling.

Product Description
A riveting firsthand account of one man's mission to investigate and document some of the most astonishing untold phenomena of our time
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.

About the Author
Tom Shroder has been an award-winning journalist, writer, and editor for more than twenty years. He is a coauthor (with John Barry) of the critically acclaimed Seeing the Light. He lives in northern Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: 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 hard pack 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 under maintained, 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.
Copyright © 1999 by Tom Shroder