“Bravo! This deeply researched and engagingly written biography does much more than tell the story of Ian Stevenson’s life and work on children with past-life memories, mediumship, apparitions, and extrasensory perception—it is a meditation on the implications of Stevenson’s findings for the relation of mind to body and the survival of consciousness after bodily death. Bering’s account is especially powerful because he comes to Stevenson from the perspective of cognitive psychology. It should inspire others who think they know what Stevenson was about, but have not read anything he wrote, to take up his extensive writings and form their own opinions about them.”

James G. Matlock, author of “Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory”

“Here is a balanced biography of Ian Stevenson that is sensitive to our twentieth-first century concerns as it connects the psychiatrist’s humanity to his many books and ideas, including his early psychedelic studies and his final speculations on birthmarks and the ‘psychophore’ of the reincarnating soul. In these pages, the reader encounters both a humane fairness and a potential ontological shock.”

Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of “How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else”

“What undergirds Bering’s inquiry is the belief that locating the psychological blunders that lead to suicide can help, in time, to curb their prevalence.”

The New Yorker