If heaven really does exist, would Eben Alexander be allowed in? Writing “Proof of Heaven” and marketing it as a science book must constitute some kind of sin.
I share my fellow Tracker Paul Raeburn’s pain over Monday’s story in the New York Times, which happily chronicled Alexander’s depressing climb up the stairway to bestsellerdom. But his success doesn’t prove you have to sell out to make it in the book world.
After all, people still buy books by neurologist Oliver Sacks. Sacks is not only an interesting writer, he’s an intriguing subject for profiles, and while there have been many, I learned quite a few surprising Sacks facts in a somewhat recent profile in New York Magazine, titled A Brain with a Heart. (It’s worth noting that Sacks is a neurologist and Alexander is a neurosurgeon, and their respective fields require different ways of thinking.)
I had read that the writer/doctor had some issues of his own with shyness, “face blindness” and some sort of place blindness, but I didn’t realize Sacks had been a biker or had pumped iron on muscle beach. Kudos to the writer, David Wallace-Wells, for getting such rich detail and presenting it in such an engaging style.
While Oliver Sacks is famous for illuminating the workings of the brain by studying the impairments of his patients, his new book, Hallucinations, apparently includes observations of his own drug-induced impairments.
The book was reviewed by Michiku Kakutani in yesterday’s New York Times. I always learn something from her reviews but she never gives away so much that I lose interest in the book. Her review of Hallucinations was fascinating in its own right.
Here’s a passage that I found particularly interesting:
“In response to physiologically based visions, we create narratives to explain what we’ve seen, and when old-fashioned figures like devils and witches “are no longer believed in, new ones — aliens, visitations from ‘a previous life’ — take their place.”
Yes, those damn after-the-fact narratives. That would make a plausible alternative hypothesis to explain Mr. Alexander’s heavenly experience. Funny he didn’t think of it.
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