Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger does an excellent job of sharing his personal near death due to rupture of a pancreatic artery aneurysm. The aneurysm was attributed to compression of the celiac artery which caused massive dilitation of the collateral pancreatic vessels ultimately leaving an aneurysm which ruptured. He has a near death experience when he sees his father who invites him to come across to the realm of death and join him. Junger has that as a very real memory of happening at the time he was in hemodynamic shock.
From there he goes on to examine the literature on near death experiences and peoples sense of other worldliness and comes to the conclusion that there is an afterlife. He examines the rationality of that conclusion by using his father’s highly developed rationality as a foil. He knows there is an afterlife as a leap of faith recognizing that proof is not possible.
His thoughts and the evaluation of his experience are very thought provoking. His examination of quantum physics emphasizes both that he can’t prove an afterlife in the Euclidean sense of proof and also that he has complete faith in the truth of the hypotheses.
His exploration of quantum mechanics and insights into the complexity of the question: what is consciousness are very thought provoking.
He is not telling the reader what to believe just explaining that for him there is no doubt.… (more)

В някаква долина в Афганистан се случват 80% от сблъсъците по време на един период на нахлуването на САЩ и авторът на книгата прекарва няколко месеца с войниците от батальона, който се сражава там.

Описанията на военния живот, ежедневието и отношенията на войниците и сраженията са интересни и неподправени, но нищо особено интересно или информативно.… (more)

It's a combination of a memoir and some anecdotes regarding death and consciousness, bundled with a very superficial and woo-filled interpretation of NDEs and quantum physics analogies. Junger writes in an extremely engaging way however, and it's hard not to get pulled along in the mixing of fact and fiction, much like a Bill Bryson book.

It's one of those rare author reads-audiobooks where that benefits the book significantly; Junger is a great and enthusiastic reader of the material.

The main problem is that the memoir part in isolation is more like a magazine article, and the facts and anecdote part operates on a spitballing level that doesn't dive deep enough to say something conclusive, and as to the physics part just gets things wrong in a popscience way. If you already knew Schrödinger's Cat was an example meant to illustrate the absurdity of the conclusion rather than be taken literally, you're ahead of Junger and this book, which ventures into Fritjof Capra levels of appealing to mysticism through halfbaked understanding of the word quantum. Maybe there's a consciousness-particle Junger muses. If that seems profound to you, you'll like this book.… (more)