This is an excellent book, especially for anyone wanting to learn more about the "afterlife" or "spirit world" who started getting interested in it during the last few years. David Fontana was a prolific writer in the area of parapsychology in England—born in 1934 and died in 2010, (five years after this book was published) He was also president of the Society for Psychical Research for three years and very active in the field. He taught in colleges, wrote all kinds of books about getting in touch with the spirit, such as about meditation. Being a teacher, he knew about most of what had been discovered since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, when people decided that it is mandatory for humans to find out more about the spirit world, other than what we were being taught in churches. He had accumulated an enormous amount of knowledge about this field by the time he wrote this book.The reason I said "in the last few years" is that most of the recent books I've been reading have been about Near Death Experiences. NDEs are indeed a superior way to find out about the spirit world, but previously, before the internet and the development of life-saving medical technology, mediums, seances, "sittings," reports of ghosts and so on were the primary way people could find out about the eternal life of our souls.I had not realized this, so when I bought this book (published in 2005, after all, after many good books about NDE research had been published, starting mainly with Raymond Moody with Life After Life in 1975 or so) I thought it was going to be mostly about NDEs or Eastern religions. But David Fontana started gathering knowledge long ago, and he reports what he knows about. And it is a LOT! I'm having a delightful time reading it, as, in the NDE books, the information coming from mediums is not as much reported. So I'm learning a lot.Fontana is a good writer, easy to understand, and his research is thorough. One person writing a review here said they thought that the author should not have gone into so much detail to demonstrate why the nay-sayers are wrong about their nay-saying about the various paranormal reports. However, for me, the nay-sayers are a huge hindrance to getting the research we need done, done, to demonstrate the veracity of what has been experienced. The VAST amount of material out there speaks for itself! Or does it? No, not with the nay-sayers. They say the same thing over and over. "It's just this" or "that" etc. And that's why we need better studies. There is less money available than willingness to perform these studies. Where does research money come from? The government. Who influences the government? The materialist reductionist science community.Read Penny Sartori's experience, in her latest book, with trying to do all the work, herself, for the excellent 5 year NDE study she designed. After one year of finding she had no time at all the live her life, close to exhaustion, she had to simplify the study. What a shame. And you won't find one single nay-sayer reading a book such as this one, chock full of proof! They listen to each other with rapt attention, convinced they know the truth already, so what would be the point of doing research on it?