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The Last Laugh: A New Philosophy of Near-Death Experiences, Apparitions, and Theparanormal
 
 
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The Last Laugh: A New Philosophy of Near-Death Experiences, Apparitions, and Theparanormal [Paperback]

Raymond A., Jr. Moody (Author, Introduction), Neale Donald Walsch (Preface)
2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)


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Book Description

May 1999
A Near-Death Experience (NDE) researcher and author of the bestselling "Life After Life" gives his latest thoughts on near-death experiences.

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Product Details

  • Paperback: 196 pages
  • Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing Company (May 1999)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1571741062
  • ISBN-13: 978-1571741066
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #349,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Raymond Moody

Raymond Moody, M.D., Ph.D. is the bestselling author of eleven books which have sold over 20 million copies. His seminal work, Life After Life, has completely changed the way we view death and dying and has sold over 13 million copies worldwide. His latest book is GLIMPSES OF ETERNITY: Sharing a Loved One's Passage from this Life to the Next.
Dr. Moody is the leading authority on the "near-death experience"--a phrase he coined in the late seventies. He is best known for his ground-breaking work on the near-death experience and what happens when we die. The New York Times calls Dr. Moody "the father of the near-death experience."
Dr. Moody has enlightened and entertained audiences all over the world for over three decades. He lectures on such topics as: Near Death Experiences, Death With Dignity, Life After Loss, Surviving Grief & Finding Hope, Reunions: Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones, The Healing Power of Humor, The Loss of Children, The Logic of Nonsense, and Catastrophic Tragedies & Events causing collective grief response.
In addition to his writing and lecturing, he is in the private practice of philosophical counseling and consulting on dying. Dr. Moody also trains hospice workers, clergy, psychologists, nurses, doctors, and other medical professionals on matters of grief recovery and dying. He helps people to identify systems of support and to cope with their anxiety, grief, and loss through better understanding of mourning and bereavement.
Dr. Moody received his medical degree from the College of Georgia and his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Virginia where he also received his M.A. and B.A.
He is the recipient of many awards including the World Humanitarian Award and a bronze medal in the Human Relations category at the New York Film Festival for the movie version of Life After Life.
Dr. Moody is a frequent media guest and has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show three times, as well as on hundreds of other local and nationally syndicated programs such as MSNBC: Grief Recovery, Today, ABC's Turning Point, and hundreds more.



Paul Perry
Paul Perry is the co-author of four New York Times bestsellers, including Saved by the Light (which was made into a popular movie) and Evidence of the Afterlife. He has co-authored five books with Dr. Raymond Moody, including a memoir Paranormal, due to be published in February 2012. His books have been published in more than 30 languages around the world.
Paul is also a documentary filmmaker whose work has appeared on worldwide television. His best known film, Jesus, the Lost Years was first the subject of a book he wrote for Random House, which follows the trail believed to be used by the Holy Family as they fled into Egypt to escape the murderous soldiers of King Herod. He has produced and directed several other films, including one on 18th Century piracy in Madagascar that aired on History Channel in 2011.
His most recent work, Afterlife, explores mankind's most nagging question, What happens when we die? This and other questions about the Afterlife are scientifically explored through modern research into near-death experiences. Through interviews with noted researchers Raymond Moody, MD, PhD, and Jeffrey Long, MD, this documentary explores the evidence of the afterlife using insightful interviews with researchers, emotional case studies, and crisply done re-creations.
"NDEs are spiritual events of staggering magnitude and complexity that have the power to change our attitudes toward death and life" says director Paul Perry. "There are reasons people are transformed when they return from a brush with death, one of which is the confidence they gain in knowing that a fresh new world awaits our last heartbeat. Another, especially for the physically ill, is the discovery that we leave our body behind and continue on as spirits free of earthy pain."
Paul is a graduate of Arizona State University, Antioch University in Los Angeles, and a former fellow at the prestigious Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University in New York City. He taught magazine writing at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, and was Executive Editor at American Health magazine, a winner of the National Magazine Awards for General Excellence. Since becoming a full-time writer, Paul has written or co-written more than 20 books on a variety of topics, including biography, health, medical science, and history.


 

Customer Reviews

31 Reviews
5 star:
 (6)
4 star:
 (3)
3 star:
 (6)
2 star:
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1 star:
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Average Customer Review
2.6 out of 5 stars (31 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Moody doges and weaves, April 7, 2005
This review is from: The Last Laugh: A New Philosophy of Near-Death Experiences, Apparitions, and Theparanormal (Paperback)
A very odd book.

I do not take exception with Moody for "backtracking" on, or no longer appearing as a true believer in, NDE's reality. That would be his right if he chose to do so, but it isn't clear to me that he is in fact backtracking. In fact, that's the entire problem with this book - not that Moody is suddenly undermining the valdity of the NDE by calling it entertainment, but more that it simply isn't at all clear what he's doing here - if anything.

Moody is not being explicit enough about what is the exact target and logical scope of his claim that "It's all entertainment".

It is one thing to say: "I don't know if NDE is real or not, but the human discussions of NDE are a form of entertainment." But at times he gets slippery and seems to imply that not only are the human discussions of the NDE a form of cultural (human created and exploited) entertainment, but that in addition, the NDE experience itself is somehow being offered to us by some transcendent power or will in the universe in order to entertain us.

That last is a very different and rather interesting and radical claim, if he's really making it. The book is so badly written that it appears he never draws a clear distinction between the NDE (and other paranormal stuff) as a cultural topic within the normal human material and semantic space vs. the NDE as a (possible) "real" ultimate experience with its own transcendent validity (which again may also be 'entertainment' in a cosmic sense, but that concept is radically different from the claim that NDE accounts and speculations function as an entertaining topic in ordinary live human discourse.

It may seem like splitting hairs, but it is a real logical confusion. Suppose I bought a book on earthquakes. For me at least, the aspect of greatest interest would be the reality of earthquakes, their frequency and severity, research on early warnings, building reinforcement methods and so on - things deriving from an understanding that earthquakes are real.

But if the books author went on and on about the entertainment value of earthquake movies and stories and the shock value of dramatic photos and what not, saying that these materials function culturally to enteratain us, and then only hinting slyly that earthquakes might or might not be real (and if real, they might or might not be experienced as a kind of entertainment) - I guess I'd agree but who cares?

I want to know: Do earthquakes really happen? And if they do, let's just talk about them straighforwardly rather than get into this side discussion of the possible entertainment value of earthquake related derivative works. It isn't exactly false, it just doesn't matter much. Anyway Moody just doesn't make clear whether he's making the radical claim that the universe/God itself is providing a true death survival mechanism for us humans (in order to entertain us), or if it is merely the prosaic claim that we humans are entertaining (or scaring) ourselves with such stories.

At a high level though, Moody has a good concept with an ancient pedigree - the ancient Hindu's clearly labeled all of material creation as "lila" - the great play of the gods.
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38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Are we having fun yet?, December 15, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Last Laugh: A New Philosophy of Near-Death Experiences, Apparitions, and Theparanormal (Paperback)
I admit to being extremely surprised by the basic premise ofRaymond Moody's new book, which is that near-death experiences and"paranormal" phenomena in general do not prove the existence of life after death, spirits, etc. His logic is sound; I just didn't expect him, at this late stage in the game, to pull back from what 100% of his readers have always believed was his viewpoint. Moody uses a satiric, bubbly tone, similar to the way philosopher Mary Daly writes: word play, puns, alliteration and rhymes; and his aim, like Daly's, is to skewer mainstream thought and convention like meat on a spit and then roast it over the coals of his acrid wit and insight. Moody also knows a lot about mythology, history, sociology and of course psychology, and ties these fields into the discussion in a very interesting inter-discliplinary fashion. His premise is that as a species we are permanently fascinated with the paranormal because it entertains us, because it's fun, and that this is reason enough to continue studying it, despite the fact that we can't prove its claims one way or the other. I give Moody credit for having the courage to express ideas which many of his fans will find offensive and shocking. My complaint is that the writing style is dense, full of asides and overblown with academic syntax. I had trouble following him at times (and I'm no dummy). And despite his claims to the contrary, his discussion of such notables as Dannion Brinkley and Betty Eadie does come off sounding as though he thinks they're fakes, which is going to be hard for many serious students of the paranormal to swallow. I appreciated Moody's assessment of the three main players in the paranormal game, which never resolves itself and never goes forward: the paranormalists themselves, striving for credibility; the professional skeptics whose religion is not objective investigation but "Scientism"; and what he calls the funda-Christians, who see Satan in every fun and pleasant thing the world has to offer, paranormal experiences included. If you're expecting another of Moody's treatises on NDE phenomena, skip this one. But if you're willing to put aside your assumptions and beliefs and consider a totally new way of thinking about the paranormal, this book is worth the effort.
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49 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars hmmmmmmmm.........., May 26, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: The Last Laugh: A New Philosophy of Near-Death Experiences, Apparitions, and Theparanormal (Paperback)
I am an NDE-er. I have NOT read this book, I stopped reading books on the subject several years ago when I also decided the IANDS - international association of near death studies - was of no use to ME. Having died I am here to tell you YES we CAN die and come back to "life" aaaaaaaaaaaand once that's REALLY happened you KNOW there is no such thing as what people think of as DEATH. And that's all, it's simply not an issue anymore. I, like most actual NDE-ers, had difficulty re-entering a world full of people living in fear of each other, the future, the past, life, death, God, evil, the stars and just about anything else you can think of. Once I realized that LACK OF "NORMAL" FEAR was the problem I was fine. SO read this and anything else you can get your hands on so you can calm down and LIVE, that's all there is - LIFE! And life is GOOD!
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
To journey to the afterlife realm and return may seem an impossible dream, but it is an extraordinary feature of late twentieth-century life. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
playful paranormalism, playful paranormalists, alluringly unknown, sigh cops, visionary reunions, ordinary paranormal, paranormal meaning, seeming believing, word paranormal, anomalistic psychology, literal nonsense, scientific skeptics, entertainment appeal, ordinary vocabulary, mirror visions, paranormal phenomenon, odium theologicum, paranormal experiences, paranormal phenomena
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Life After Life, Wolf Head, Dannion Brinkley, Mirror Vision Complex, Captain Dynamite, Neale Donald Walsch, Boy Thunder, Skeptical Inquirer, The Beast, Uncle Hamperd
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