This is a great book. I’d be hard pressed to find a better one for a general audience on the reasons we need to take survival research and its findings seriously. In fact, it’s so good, so clear and well-organized, that I’ve read it three times, recommended it to friends and family, and will continue to give it as a special gift to those I think might appreciate its worth. To paraphrase a spiritual teacher I know who read it upon my recommendation and loved it: it has the capacity to change lives and how we view death and the likelihood of an afterlife. It can also change the very nature of spiritual practice, for those engaged in it, once we begin to understand that indeed, we survive death as individuals who live, love, learn, and grow and deeply wish to continue to do so—apparently, in a process that cycles and evolves through a mysterious marriage of both biological and spiritual realms.It’s not just that Ms. Kean has done her homework exceedingly well, examining a broad range of survival evidence—from field research into verified reincarnation cases, to near-death/after-death experiences, to mental and physical mediumship, and to apparition cases where spirits are clearly interacting with the living—but that her own integrity and sincere personal engagement continually shine through. Her skepticism, from the start, has been open to being changed by the evidence, unlike those who are victims of the will-to-disbelieve it. As she takes us on her investigative journey, while inviting long-time researchers to weigh in with their own excellent chapters, the strong evidence for an afterlife is triangulated in the radar. If that weren’t enough, she shares her personal evidential sessions with mental and physical mediums, including exchanges with her friend, the dead ufologist Budd Hopkins, and direct encounters with her beloved dead brother.As she wrestles sincerely with the wily dog guarding the door to the afterlife—the super-psi hypothesis that would reduce much of the evidence of mediumship, whether mental or physical, to the psychic (psi) abilities of the living—I think she and her fellow researchers show (even when she cannot quite bring herself to say it) the strength of the evidence against that argument. But that’s not all. More radically—as long-time afterlife researcher Dan Drasin puts it near the end of the book—I think she winds up showing that the various phenomena examined by afterlife research are only explicable in a hyper-dimensional view of reality—where the sources of life and consciousness, in opposition to scientific materialism, have their true home. In the end, the psi abilities shown by psychics and mediums—whether they’re focused on living psi or survival psi—are only possible because the mind, consciousness, individuality, and indeed, life itself, have their roots in higher dimensions.Ms. Kean doesn’t quite fully move onto the higher ground of hyper-dimensional model-building by the end of the book, nor does she discuss the first-hand findings of conscious out-of-body experience practitioners—which I think are highly relevant to exploring the relationship of such things as “ectoplasm,” “etheric” or “astral bodies,” and the mind and consciousness itself, to the physical brain and body and the material domain. Once we’re convinced the afterlife exists and that we can interact with it and the people within it, we need to explore scientifically how it’s all structured, its various constituents, and what makes it all work so elegantly together. Moreover, since Leslie is a UFO researcher as well (see her UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record)—what are the implications of a non-materialist view of reality for ufology?I’ll be eagerly awaiting Ms. Kean’s next books, where I hope she’ll take up some of these topics. In the meantime, I can highly recommend Surviving Death. It’s one of the best books out there for the general public on the evidence for the afterlife.Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife