Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives
by Tom Shroder
1999

FROM THE BACK COVER

All across the globe, small children spontaneously speak of previous lives, beg to be taken "home," pine for mothers and husbands and mistresses from another life, and know things that there seems to be no normal way for them to know. From the moment these children can talk, they speak of people and events from teh past—not vague stories of centuries ago, but details of specific, identifiable individuals who may have died just months, weeks, or even hours before the birth of the child in questions.

For thirty-seven years, Dr. Ian Stevenson has traveled the world from Lebanon to suburban Virginia investigating and documenting more than two thousand of these past life memory cases. Now, his essentially unknown work is being brought to the mainstream by Tom Shroder, the first journalist to have the privilege of accompanying Dr. Stevenson in his fieldwork. Shroder follows Stevenson into the lives of children and families touched by this phenomenon, changing from skeptic to believer as he comes face to face with concrete evidence he cannot discount in this spellbinding and true story.

FROM THE PROLOGUE

"This is what Stevenson has been doing for almost forty years; it is what we have been doing in Lebanon and India: examining records, interviewing witnesses, and measuring the results against possible alternative explanations. I have seen close up, as few others have, how compelling some of these cases can be — and not just factually, but in the emotion visible in the eyes and the voices of the subjects, their families, and the families of the people they claim to have been. I have seen and heard astonishing things, things for which I have no easy explanation."

OUR COMMENTS

At the onset, this book didn't strike us as particularly compelling, especially since it was at the beginning of our afterlife investigation journey. But once we got to the last case review, there was obviously more to what the author had uncovered. Whether you're already convinced or not about past lives, reincarnation or multiple lives, these stories will have you asking more questions than you previously had thought of.