Jim B. Tucker, M.D. follows in the footsteps of the late, legendary Ian Stevenson who pioneered the investigation of past-life reports by children. The importance of relying on very early childhood reports instead of later ones is that when young children do report past lives, their past-life memories and feelings may fade and be forgotten as early as five years old and usually by seven. If, at age seven or eight, a child still maintains an identification with someone who lived in the past that they earlier claimed to be, their belief is usually contaminated with feedback from others about their earlier statements. Also, two year olds who claim to have been U.S. Navy aviators in the Pacific Theater of World War II (as one child is reported to have done in 1CReturn to Life 1D) do not usually read books or research the Internet to come up with the story.

Tucker, like Stevenson, is not the sort of person who never met a paranormal claim he didn 19t believe. (Stevenson once commented on a book by a medium who claimed to have channeled the great psychologist-philosopher William James: 1CIf the vapid writing 26 did indeed emanate from him, I can only say that this implies a terrible post-mortem reduction of personal capacities. 1D) When there isn 19t enough evidence to conclusively prove a connection between a child in the present and a claim about the past, Tucker plainly says so and more or less accepts defeat. (Technically, he says that these cases are unsolved, which is not at all the same as saying they are unproved, because none of these cases are considered proof; rather they are considered to be evidence.) He can be quite reasonable as when he relates the case of a Turkish man who admired John F. Kennedy and claimed that his son was the reincarnation of the assassinated U.S. president. As Tucker recognizes, the boy probably seconded the claim to please his father who consciously or unconsciously coached the boy on information about Kennedy 19s life which is common knowledge. There is no way to establish any truth in this claim.

Of course, past-life stories told by children usually seem to relate to the lives of obscure people from the past, which is a two-edged sword since it means on the one hand that the children are less likely to be making it up, but it also makes it difficult and often impossible to discover a real person who matches the biographical hints given in the child 19s utterances. In one case, Tucker thought that a little girl might be remembering a life in Virginia City, Nevada, in the mid-nineteenth century, and the girl thought this was correct, but when they went to the town, the girl 19s reaction was muted, although she confessed at the airport when they were leaving that she longed to stay. Ultimately, while her past-life report did fit a description of life in the historic boomtown in many striking particulars, Tucker noted that the individual she claimed to have been could not be identified.

Even without an identification, the issue of how very young children could put together accurate portraits of other times and places is intriguing, but those cases are not as impressive as those of three boys that Tucker studied after they claimed to have been identifiable people from the past. These three individuals were not easily identified. One had been a twenty-one year old U.S. naval aviator who died in combat on March 3, 1945. It took several people years to find this individual by putting together statements from the child with information that was sometimes difficult to uncover. In the end, though, the fit was like that of a glove. Another had been a failed Hollywood actor turned talent agent. The boy only had the name of one old movie he had been in without the name of the actor, which made it difficult rather than easy to identify him 14for a long time, no one could figure out which cast member he was or whether he was an unnamed extra. (It turned out that everyone had ignored the fact that he was credited in the cast but had no dialogue in the movie, so it was impossible to determine which character he is supposed to be; a likely possibility is that he had a line in the shooting script that was omitted from the final cut.)

Still another boy also claimed to have had a career in Hollywood, but as a writer. He was also able to identify the middle name, which came up because of its similarity to his own middle name. (This is not explained in the book, but in a radio interview the author seems to have slipped and said that the boy 19s middle name was 1CCole. 1D) The middle name of the writer sounded like 1CCoe 1D from the boy 19s pronunciation of it. His parents asked him what movies he had written and ticked off a number of titles of famous movies. When they suggested 1CGone with the Wind, 1D the boy said that was one of his. His mother looked it up on the Internet and found that, although several writers worked on the script, the main credit was given to Sydney Coe Howard. Does that send shivers up your spine? It does mine, and that is the sort of thing that makes this a fun book to read.

Of course, the most striking hit Tucker reports did involve a famous person. A two year old, whose parents knew nothing about golf and cared less, became addicted to the Golf Channel on cable television and soon began insisting that he remembered being Bobby Jones, the famous early twentieth century golf pro. This might be easily dismissed for similar reasons to the JFK identification although, in this case, the parents were less inclined to encourage the claim, but when shown a photograph of Jones standing next to another man, the boy said, 1CThat 19s my friend, Harry Garden. 1D It turns out that the man 19s name was Harry Vardon. (Another chill up my spine.) What is most striking about the 1CBobby Jones 1D case is that, while the boy stopped having memories of being Bobby Jones, he became a golf prodigy. At age seven, he entered junior golf tournaments and won 41 out of 50 games. True, he had been taught by a PGA golf pro, but the golf pro only agreed to teach the boy 14from age three-and-a-half 14because he was impressed by the boy 19s natural talent.

Tucker analyses a database of over two thousand cases from around the world, and he draws from these some statistics that turn out to be spooky rather than dry. For example, while the majority of children who report past-life memories are boys, if you separate out the reports of non-violent deaths, those cases are fifty-fifty male and female. The violent death reports make up seventy percent of cases, and about seventy percent of those are male. Well, it turns out that crime statistics tend to show that about seventy percent of those who meet violent deaths are also male. In other words, the breakdown of violent deaths in Tucker 19s cases seems to reflect reality and also supports Tucker 19s speculation that a violent end could be a catalyst for a transmigrating soul to give its next incarnation nightmarish and therefore vivid and remarkable memories. For example, the little boy who claimed to have been a naval aviator began by complaining of nightmares about being in a plane crash. The boy who claimed to be the Hollywood writer complained of feeling crushed both in dreams and when his little body was constricted in any way 14even by a well-meaning hug from his mother. It later turned out that the writer had been crushed to death by a tractor in an accident on his working farm in Massachusetts. (I 19ve read elsewhere that accidents involving farm equipment have long been a leading cause of non-natural death.)

From chapter eight onward, this book explores explanations of the past life reports. The author believes in a kind of Hegelian universe in which consciousness is prior to physical matter and helps to create it. While interesting, this part of the book is speculative and necessarily tentative, although it uses for support some interesting data from the Stevenson-Tucker database.

For example, the reader might have noticed, from the case histories presented in the first seven chapters, that the children tend to report past lives within the same species, the same sex and the same nationality although there are exceptions to all of these trends. Exceptions include an Indian boy who claimed to have been a snake, and an Indian girl who claimed to have lived previously in Bangladesh. (Many Americans might not realize it, but these geographically adjacent regions are separated by many cultural and linguistic differences.) Tucker reveals that this tendency is, indeed, reflected in the database and that about ninety percent of cases involve reports of a past life in the same country and usually within the same ethnic group, although there can be interesting exceptions to that, too. (One European-American reported a past life as an African-American.)

Another interesting factoid is that the median time between death and rebirth is about sixteen months, whereas the American stories reported in this book are about lives that are sometimes separated by forty or more years.

Tucker suspects that there are psychological reasons why, assuming the reality of past lives, children 19s reports show different degrees of affinity between the two lives. For example, some children claim rebirth within the same family while, perhaps more usually, they are reborn in a different family from the past life one. Tucker suggests that this correlates with the circumstances of the death. Say, if your mother-in-law murdered you, the last thing you would want to do is be reborn into the same family.

If you believe in ESP but not in past lives (and who doesn 19t fit that configuration of credulity!), you might object that these children might not be remembering past lives that they lived but are, rather, merely(!) picking up information psychically about another person from another time and place. This explanation might seem peculiar, especially to someone who doesn 19t believe in ESP or reincarnation, but as Tucker himself points out, the reader has, after all, read thus far into a book about reincarnation. The issue strikes Tucker as particularly relevant when the child does appear to be able to make uncanny predictions about the future apart from his information about past lives. This appears to be so in a few of these case studies.

Tucker 19s speculation that there are what have been called by others 1COver-souls 1D might seem novel or difficult to grasp if the reader has not elsewhere encountered less tentative presentations of this idea. The idea is that if past lives are real, then the essence or 1Csoul 1D that is common to each life constitutes a more or less unitary entity that is greater than the individuals who appear in each life. That entity has its own consciousness that is both an accumulation of the different individuals and, at the same time, greater than the sum of the parts.

I would also like to say that this book contains, for me, a memorable character who rivals my favorite fictional characters, such as Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse from Neal Stephenson 19s novel 1CCryptonomicon. 1D Waterhouse is as poignantly and richly memorable as almost any character in other novels of recent memory (even while some other novels might be more satisfying over all). In this book, the boy who seems to be channeling a mid-twentieth century Hollywood talent agent is as vivid as any character in a novel. The incongruity of a three-year-old behaving like a cigar-chomping, self-important wise guy who occasionally calls other people idiots and frequently manifests precognitive abilities is funny and touching as well as infuriating, no doubt, if you had to put up with him for any length of time, and it just might make a great novel by itself.

When I was a teenager, I used to read lots of 1Cstrange mysteries 1D books, and only a few of them were ever as fun to read as are the first seven chapters of this book. ( )

Couldn't put this down. I felt a lot better about death after I read it. ( )

I found out about this book after joining a forum created by Carol Bowman.I really enjoyed reading some of the case studies but skipped the chapters on Physics.I was a bit frustrated in the cases where they took so long to meet.The children in those cases forgot most of their memories and were almost a waste of time.I like his ideas about us being in one shared dream, I sometimes feel the same way when I wake up in the morning. ( )