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Cafe Society
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My mom recently bought To Heaven and Back: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Her Death, Heaven, Angels, and Life Again: A True Story by Mary C. Neal M.D.. for myself and each of my siblings. I think she saw the author on the Today show and was incredibly touched by this person’s story. I’m sure the next time I talk to her on the phone, she’s going to ask what I thought about it. It obviously means a lot to her and I don’t want to shit on it, so I’m just going to be evasive.

What I find so jarring is the overwhelming positive reviews this baseless glurge has from people! The top rated amazon review begins…

[QUOTE=Bruce Stubblefield]
At the same time that Dr. Mary Neal was drowning in a river in Chile, her husband, Bill, appeared to me in a dream.
[/QUOTE]

And all the comments to that are all like “what a beautiful story…” Holy shit. Literally. I think all that adulation compelled me to write a review of my own (though on goodreads, where my mom is less likely to stumble upon it. I’m sure the self-selected audience will ignore it completely, but writing it helped get the “gahhhh…” out of my system.

[QUOTE=my goodreads review]
To be sure, the author, orthopaedic surgeon Mary C. Neal, MD, encountered some seriously traumatic experiences, once in 1999 when she nearly died in a kayaking incident and again ten years later when she lost her son in a senseless automobile accident. This woman has had a lot with which to process and cope. On a personal level, my heart goes out to her and wish her love and support.

This book, however, is a different matter.

I found it to be a 220 pages of exasperating religious witnessing that took a long time to read because I couldn’t get my eyes to stop rolling.

Neal believes she died, went to heaven, and walked with angels. However, it wasn’t her time because she had more work to do (I guess clerical errors are not unheard of in Heaven), so she was resurrected. In recovery, while her vision was failing, she was visited twice by an angel (or Jesus or God, she’s not really sure, and why would you even ask?) who revealed to her the mysteries of the universe.

The most interesting highlight from the truths revealed to Neal by God’s agent: Before we’re born, God gives us our life’s mission. We get to review it with our “planning angel” (her words). We apparently have what she calls “branch points,” during which we can literally retire (die), or get a new job. (Any similarity these divine plans have to contemporary professional career tracks an MD might be familiar with are purely coincidental.) She also tells us that children can remember heaven from before they were born. The younger they are, the better they remember, so the next time you see a two-year-old, be sure to ask!

Of course, this may sound a little farfetched to some secular disbelievers (whom Neal recounts having made a habit of avoiding throughout her life); but the reader should take the author’s word that what she experienced is true. Not that she ever refutes or even acknowledges the existence of any other prevailing neurological causesof an experience like hers; but because she lets us know from the get-go that as a doctor and woman of science, she’s a “skeptic” who “understands numbers and statistics,” which should presumably put any questions of her objectivity to rest. She repeats this characterization several times in the book, including once when the assertion follows a chapter in which she claims an owl perched outside her breakfast nook, urging her to visit her ailing step-father just before he passed away. (Although to be fair, she later realized it was an angel just disguised as an owl; and who among us hasn’t fallen for that old trick?)

Neal is quite up-front about being a lifelong churchgoer, Bible literalist, who has repeatedly searched for ways to make God more central in her life, and believes that what people call “coincidence” is actually God’s intervention (either directly or via angels, it’s not entirely clear). Despite this religiosity, she wants us to know that she wouldn’t characterize herself as being “deeply religious or spiritual” before her death and subsequent resurrection.

While I found the book to be mostly harmless, there were a few instances in which I found the author’s perspective a bit oblivious. The most shocking example is that even though she is intimately aware of the brutally horrific genocide in Rwanda from Tutsi priest Father Ubald (Chapter 32), she really isn’t convinced of the notion that “bad things actually happen to good people” (Chapter 17). I hope to God she hasn’t shared this viewpoint in the presence of people affected by tragedy on that level.

Although most of the chapters start with an obligatory Bible passage, chapter four is kicked off with a quote from Emerson: “People only see what they are prepared to see.” I can only presume the irony is lost on the author.
[/QUOTE]

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A planning angel? Planning angel? Heaven is a place on Earth and it’s the bureaucratic basement of the government!

143

Went to Amazon to read some one-star reviews of the I Went to Heaven Aren’t I Special? book, expecting to see more reviews along the lines of what B. Serum wrote. Instead of critical analysis, there’s a bunch of folks complaining that the author wrote too much about herself and not enough about what Heaven is really like. Oh my.

144

And Dung Beetle reports hating “The Girl in a Swing”.

My own take on Adams: “Watership Down”, indeed superb. The Girl in a Swing" – for me, splendidly eerie and unnerving novel of the supernatural. “Maia” I found an entertaining picaresque / sexy romp, though set in the same universe as the IMO awful “Shardik”. Apart from the three above-listed which I liked: as regards everything else by Adams which I’ve read (I gave up on him after the Richard III / Henry VII one), I wish he hadn’t bothered, and had carried on in his day job.

I personally loathed “The Plague Dogs” and “Shardik”, because I cannot abide being preached / evangelized at through the medium of fiction – even if I’m sympathetic to the cause which is being plugged.

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Re your last sentence – I’m glad I’m not the only one (well, kind-of). I find Jane Austen unreadable, and I have tried her a number of times. The content doesn’t appeal to me much, plus her English-of-200-years-ago drives me mad. “Some body” and “any body” as two words, etc. – very shallow of me, I’m sure, but all that just makes me want to scream.

I had hopes of “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”, but could only manage the first few chapters, having found that basically the whole book is written in Jane-Austen-speak – with the “conceit” of its being documents from the era concerned, discovered long after. Very clever of Susanna C., no doubt; but the kiss of death for me. As posters have observed, great cleverness does not necessarily mean great writing talent.

I’m relieved that majority opinion of “J. S. & Mr. N.” seems to be that in its huge length, not a great deal happens – seems I didn’t miss much.

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Opinions vary. PBS picked Manhunter as one of the ten best small movies made in its entire decade.

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That’s not sadistic murder, though. There are several incidents of rape and molestation in the book, but not every male character is a rapist either.

The character you’re describing is a poorly educated teen gang leader in the 1950s with some half-baked ideas about Communism and revolution against the upper classes and men. These ideas, taken to an extreme, eventually lead her into serious criminal activity and result in the collapse of the gang and serious consequences for some of its members. While this character is clearly supposed to be charismatic, it seemed clear enough to me that she wasn’t intended as some sort of prophet or a mouthpiece for Oates’s personal beliefs.

You are of course free to find the book unpleasant, the characters unlikable, and the whole thing badly written, but I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that Oates is a man-hater who wrote Foxfire in order to persuade her readers that all men are evil. Oates also wrote a book from the perspective of a serial killer (Zombie, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer), that doesn’t mean she’s a serial killer herself or even that she admires serial killers.

148

I can agree with that.

149

I’ve said this before, but I was not impressed with Water For Elephants. It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t think it lived up to the hype at all.

And anything by Cathy Lamb. I’ve only read one of her books (Such a Pretty Face) but it was so obnoxious, shallow, and ridiculous that I know for sure that everything she writes, says, or thinks has to be horrible. It was worse than a Disney movie as far as every single character being either pure awesome or ridiculously over-the-top assholes. And it tried so hard to be quirky. I am baffled by her books getting good reviews.

I read the beginning of it and the mom was so pretentious and long-winded that I couldn’t keep reading.

150

I think it would have been a better story if

the love interest had killed the ringmaster instead of copping out and having the elephant do it.

151

At the risk of becoming a still worse Richard Adams bore – realise that I have enjoyed, by him, his autobiography re approx. the first 25 years of his life, “The Day Gone By” (including his World War 2 army experiences); and his book, in collaboration with Ronald Lockley, about a journey by ship to Antarctica. Perhaps I’m more of an Adams fan than had initially thought: he writes well and very readably, it’s just that re fiction and imaginative authorship, he has IMO severe limitations.

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Continuing on Adams, I note that no one has mentioned his “biography” of Lee’s horse during the Civil War, Traveller. I read it ages ago, not long after I read Watership Down (which means roughly in fifth grade), and remember quite liking it, but I’ve never read it again since. Curious if anyone in the Adams pile-on has any thoughts on it.

(FTR, I too tried reading Plague Dogs at around the same time. I don’t think I finished it.)

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I thought “Traveller” OK, but only marginally worth the time taken to read it. Not one of his real “turkeys”.

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I’ll add my vote for Insomnia and Tropic of Cancer and almost everything by Piers Anthony.

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Oh, I thought of another one which I think hasn’t been mentioned yet: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. Whiny, self-righteous, lacking in insight, and more! Just an awful book in my estimation.

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What about Jodi Picoult? I can’t decide if it’s more contrived or sensationalistic.

157

James Joyce, the 20th century’s worst writer of English prose, is bafflingly
considered the best by a majority of our tweed-brained professoriate.

T.S. Eliot duplicates Joyce’s feat in the realm of poetry.

158

Ah, but Eliot at least wrote the Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which, whatever you think of the musical it inspired, is a delightful book for any cat lover.

Joyce, you’d think he would’ve at least wrote something for all of us drunks, but no…

159

Books mentioned here that I have read and feel strongly about either way…

I disliked Mystic River by Lehane, the Dark Tower series by King, and all abovementioned books by Piers Anthony and Stephen Donaldson, not the way you dislike a book that is boring or pointless, but with disgust and unwillingness to get near them again. So they are books that I, too, disrecommend.

On the flip side, Lisey’s Story by King is one of my favorites of his books, one of the best characterized and most engaging, readable and mesmerizing. I like Jane Austen, which may account for how much I also liked Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell by Clarke. It’s untrue, however, that little happens. I’m going to try to give an idea of how very much happens in this book without spoilers (or without too many spoilers): faeries bring the dead back to life, kidnap people and replace them with changelings, ensnare them in their nefarious plans; the magicians of England are forced into retirement and admitting that they’re all frauds by seeing real magic done for the first time in their lives; rich scoundrels and poor wannabee rich scoundrels intrigue socially, commit fraud, and other white collar crimes; the prophecy of the return of the once and future King of England who is NOT Arthur is yet again told, and bound to happen; a single man corners the market on books of magic but fails despite this to keep one determined soul from learning magic seemingly by sheer intuition and guesswork; a friendship and rivalry of epic proportions takes place; magic is cast in aid of war time efforts with dramatic effect… it’s full of stuff happening. And that’s not even counting the footnotes, in which other stuff happens. But, it all happens in Austen-pastiche prose, so if you don’t like that, you won’t get all that much out of it. And a lot of the story is told a bit indirectly, so you have to be paying attention to notice everything that’s happening - some, maybe most, of it isn’t flat out explained to the reader right away.

My own disrecommends… the one I want to put first I can’t even remember/find, so it’s not much use to you. It was about a policeman who died and as a ghost tried to protect his former partner. Terrible, sappy writing, over idealization of every character, just nearly unreadable.

Night’s Dawn series by Peter Hamilton - almost enjoyable to read because of the crazy plot and world building, but the characters are utterly awful in many dimensions of awfulness. So it leaves a horrible reading aftertaste.

Bag of Bones by Stephen King - super annoying main character. Kind of tedious story. Overly long. As stories about writers/bereaved spouses by King go, apparently I strongly prefer the one where the writer died, not his wife (comparing to Lisey’s Story). I could probably do a long essay compare/contrsting these two books. But no one would want to read that :wink:

Alastair Reynolds. I’ve only read two books by him, but they were bleak and unrewarding - bland characterization combined with really dark plot lines made for a lot of ‘why am I reading about all these awful things happening to these ciphers of people’ and I stopped reading them.

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I admit that Eliot’s serious verse has prejudiced me to the extent that I have never
been able to even take a peek at his light stuff, although I am a cat lover myself.

No is right.