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Combining Eastern spiritualism with Western science, the founder of the national charity God's Love We Deliver creates an inspiring, practical, and hopeful approach to facing death. Uplifting without being sentimental, Stone explores such important issues as fear and grief, near-death experiences, survival, and preparation for death.

If wishes could fly, this simplistic homily about what happens when we die would be airborne. The book is based on a "six-week course about death" that Stone has given regularly since 1989, and it sounds it: chatty, meandering, anecdotal, lacking the rigor of a proper study of death-for example, David Darling's Zen Physics (Forecasts, Feb. 26). This is Stone's first book, but she is well known as the founder of God's Love We Deliver, an organization that delivers free meals to homebound AIDS patients. Here, she makes no bones about her belief in the integrity and survival of the self after death, but she's coy about the likely source of her faith in this idea-her discipleship to the Hindu guru Swami Muktananda. Instead, she points to near-death experiences as proof of survival, missing the point that these experiences are called "near" for a reason, and then to flimsy evidence regarding past lives. The author does forcefully remind readers of the inevitability of death, but her scanting of the "grief process" as "not logical, not appropriate" because we're immortal anyway smacks of spiritual superiority. Stone insists that "there is literally no such thing as death," contradicting the teaching of nearly every major spiritual tradition that death is not only real but a mystery. She no doubt means well, but her book doesn't start the conversation-it stops it dead.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.