Customer Reviews

Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife: On the Other Side Known Commonly As "The Little Book"

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I don't understand some the below reviewers atitudes about this book. Yes, parts of book don't make a lot of sense, but I see that as the authors attempt to get us to look at our belief systems, when glanced at in the same way- are'nt they just as absurd? I think some people including me, came on this book thinking it was going to be another Ishamael- "a book to change the world and give people answers." Rather, it is a book to change your thinking. One thing I got from it was this- the answers to the questions you have gotten in this life, are, like the answers you get in this book, subjective because no one really knows! There are gems of wisdom to be gained from reading this book, I could go on...

A diabolically wild collaboration between Daniel ( "Ishmael") Quinn and one of my favorite science fiction authors Tom ("Roithamer's Universe") Whalen. I've never ever seen a book like this one. It's a compendium of the Afterlife, but an Afterlife unlike any I have read about before. There are "do's and don't's," concerns concerning Zeno's paradoxes and particle physics, and even summaries of books written in the Afterlife by Asimov, Nabokov, Trakl, Arthur Godfrey, Lucy Terry (the first African- American poet), and Nikola Tesla. Also, check out the great photo-collages by Greg Boyd (of Asylum Press fame). A weird and wondrous book. How in the world did the authors trick Bantam into publishing such a delight!

I found this book in the middle of other very large beautiful books. I picked it up, read the title and laughed. However I couldn't let my judgmental opinions get in the way of seeing ALL SIDES. If you are very much into paraphsycology, you will understand this book from page one to the ending, however if you are not a very spiritual person, take it with a grain of salt. Use it for you own knowlege, in other words use it as "JUST IN CASE"

Did you know that in the afterlife a wind storm can leave your brain in such a shamble that you believe yourself a bicycle? That Borges completes after his death his Biography of the Infinite? That afterlife physicists Rotnac and Rekcur believe the other side is an anti-universe composed in part of charmed anti-quarks? Neither did I, but that's what I learned in this decidedly nutty, bizarre, fantastic, comic fiction. Quinn and Whalen have constructed the craziest, cleverest book I've read since, say, Queneau's Exercises in Style or O'Brien's wacky afterlife novel The Third Policeman. The authors perform their magic with a straight face, but don't be deceived--this is anything but a straight book.

I am more familiar with the works of Tom Whalen than Daniel Quinn, and I find in this beautifully designed book much evidence that Tom's vision prevailed or at least persisted. Not one to follow a straight line when a crooked one ambles into delightful junctures, Tom explores whimsically our perplexedness in the face and certainty of the beyond. After we shuffle off this mortal coil, what happens to our spirits? And so Quinn and Whalen imagine a book that provides such answers. All in all, it is a brief work, perhaps owing some of its approach to similar guides to one's finances or health. But such guides are never as elegant as the "Little Book," to say the least. Finally, I will observe that this work, while offbeat, somehow manages in its humor to possess an elegiac quality. Thus the reader is not meant to read the book through like a novel, but to leaf through it slowly, pretending along with its authors that these slightly or extremely odd answers make sense. Why not these as much as some others we have already been told? Knowledge as charm or the charm of knowledge. Clutch this little book close. While the meaning of life may be elusive and the meaning of death equally inexact, what to do while "engaged" by it is another matter!

To say this work was a disapppointment is not really fair. I purchased it with high expectations that it would supply me with insights and answers, but I did not get that. Instead, it allowed me to not believe everything I read of this type, take it with a 'grain of salt', and continue to seek my own guidance from within from my Higher Self. I felt that it was a good work of 'creative writing' and was not intended to clarify the afterlife, only allow us to form our own conclusions, and see a lighter side of the subject. To say that is was given as in a dream, and a whole book was down-loaded into his memory is a little preposterous; but many people may have believed this. I think the thing that truly bothered me the most is the grey, dark side feeling that the work portrayed. It projected a less than "Light and Love" vibration. There was no mention anywhere of spirituality or anything leaning to a higher awareness or Supreme Being. Nor was there mentioned that in the next level or density we further learn and grow spiritually to increase our vibrant frequency. All in all...a thought-provoking read, from two very good story-tellers. Perhaps next time they will have a Revelation to take it up another level.

Borges meets Barthelme and on their way encounter the spirits of Nabokov, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and other masters of metafiction. Fans of Daniel Quinn's didactic books with their questionable anthropology will likely not know what has hit them. Fans of Quinn as an iconoclast and of imaginative postmodern fiction at its finest will be delighted.

Let me start off by saying that anything Daniel Quinn writes has a certain magnetic quality to it. Quinn is a master at explaining his ideas in a way that even a reader like me can understand and enjoy. However this particular book, unlike his other masterpieces, do not elucidate what both authors were working to substantiate. Maybe it's another poke of our societies religious affirmations or maybe Quinn actually spoke to his Mailbox lady in a dream, (doubtful though, imho, all that introduction did was to begin carving up our religious and superstitious beliefs before page one), either way it's never truly clarified. In the end, I read it straight through, laughed when I thought something was funny, googled some famous names that I've never heard of, then when it was over, reread it. You never know, this may be a good book to remember in the future. "A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife" will have ideas that you may not grasp at first, but you will, and when you do you'll be all the more better for it. : ]

Ok I read it and it did suck me in early on. It just got very strange towards the end. I've never read either of the authors other books but I found the title interesting so I decided to read it. Ah maybe to some it'd be a good read. Thus the half and half review.

I picked this book up thinking it was a spoof on the Beetlejuice idea. Fortunately it tried to answer all the sill thoughts we have about the Afterlife (will my amputated limb be there?) without addressing Religion, spirituality or a Supreme Being. Essentially, the Afterlife as in Life, is what you make of it.