Description: "[SUM] belongs to that category of strange, unclassifiable books that will haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned." -Alexander McCall Smith "SUMhas the unaccountable, jaw-dropping quality of genius." -Geoff Dyer "This delightful, thought-provoking little collection belongs to that category of strange, unclassifiable books that will haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned. It is full of tangential insights into the human condition and poetic thought experiments . . . . It is also full of touching moments and glorious wit of the sort one only hopes will be in copious supply on the other side." -The New York Times "Imaginative and inventive." -Wall Street Journal "This little book is teeming, writhing with imagination." -Los Angeles Times "SUMis terrific. It's such a good idea that I was grinding my teeth all the way through wishing I'd thought of it first. The inventiveness, the clarity and wit of the prose, the calm air of moral understanding that pervades the whole thing, add up to something completely original. I hopeSUMwill be the great big hit it deserves to be." -Philip Pullman, author ofThe Golden Compass "A clever little book by a neuroscientist translates lofty concepts of infinity and death into accessible human terms. What happens after we die? Eagleman wonders in each of these brief, evocative segments. Are we consigned to replay a lifetime's worth of accumulated acts, as he suggests in 'Sum,' spending six days clipping your nails or six weeks waiting for a green light? Is heaven a bureaucracy, as in 'Reins,' where God has lost control of the workload? Will we download our consciousnesses into a computer to live in a virtual world, as suggested in 'Great Expectations,' where 'God exists after all and has gone through great trouble and expense to construct an afterlife for us'? Or is God actually the size of a bacterium, battling good and evil on the 'battlefield of surface proteins,' and thus unaware of humans, who are merely the 'nutritional substrate'? Mostly, the author underscores in 'Will-'o-the-Wisp,' humans desperately want to matter, and in afterlife search out the 'ripples left in our wake.' Eagleman's turned out a well-executed and thought-provoking book." -Publishers Weekly(starred review) "With both a childlike sense of wonder and a trenchant flair for irony, the Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist generously offers forty variations on the theme of God and the afterlife, imagining what each of us might find when we shuffle off this mortal coil.... Sum is great fun-sort of a brainy parlor game in print--and a modest satire aimed at zealots who define heaven and God to serve their own ends. It is also a reminder that when it comes to our knowledge of the hereafter, we have loads of faith but not a scintilla of proof." -Texas Monthly "Wow." -New York Observer "This stunningly original book is little more than a 100 pages long. You can get through it in an hour, but you'd be mad to hurry, and you will certainly want to return to it many times . . . . The real question, Eagleman indirectly reminds us, is how to live. This is what makes his book greater than the sum of its brilliant parts. Its success depends on a combination of exquisitely rendered detail and the massive implications that result . . . .

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