What do you think?
Rate this book
They Walk Among Us: An Investigation into the Phenomenon of After-Death Materialisation
Book by Heathcote, Emma
260 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2004
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 31, 2013
After reading a couple of other reviews, I waited for this book's arrival with keen anticipation only to find it truly awful! Why? Well, one hardly knows where to start - but I'll try! The book's author, apparently, has a PhD in religious experience but the utterly poor standard of scholarship demonstrated within beggars belief: it's repetitious, banal and full of `waffle'. She devotes a 'whole 4 pages' to debunking Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, primarily by invoking the work of a retired university lecturer in engineering called Ronald Pearson. An example of the author's method of argument can be found at the end of Chapter 4 where she concludes that `the biggest argument that I can offer you in favour of there being an afterlife is that no scientist has yet proved that the afterlife does not exist'. Well, I can't recall any scientist proving that creatures called clangers don't live on a far away planet living happily on blue-string soup fed to them by a soup dragon but it doesn't mean that they do!
The whole thing has the feel of an offering from a well-intentioned 16 year old trying to get good marks for her GCSE coursework! How on Earth this ever got to be published is the real mystery: the book certainly appears not to have been edited - whole sections should have been excised not to mention the fact that it's also full of misspellings and gaps where words should have been in order for it to make, at least, some sort of sense. To sum up - it's tripe and does neither its author's cause nor the people whose work she claims to 'champion' any favours at all.
The whole thing has the feel of an offering from a well-intentioned 16 year old trying to get good marks for her GCSE coursework! How on Earth this ever got to be published is the real mystery: the book certainly appears not to have been edited - whole sections should have been excised not to mention the fact that it's also full of misspellings and gaps where words should have been in order for it to make, at least, some sort of sense. To sum up - it's tripe and does neither its author's cause nor the people whose work she claims to 'champion' any favours at all.
November 8, 2023
Well ....
I am interested in the subject matter, who isn't! But I'm on something like page 70 now and still haven't come across the point of this book. Surely the way to do this is to grab the reader immediately with case histories and hard evidence to support the assertion that there is life after death. That's what I want to hear, that's why I picked the book up, but it's almost like the author has only a very few snippets of information and needs to string it out and delay the reveal as long as possible in order to justify a book rather than a leaflet. I'll finish it, but ... really?
Ok, let me save you time and heartache here. The whole point in picking this book up is in the very last chapter. Here it is: current scientific thinking accepts the possibility of a 'substance' at a sub-atomic level (a quantum substance I guess you'd call it) which quite literally infiltrates everything and joins it all together into a continuum. With me so far? Right, this substance has been labelled, according to this book, the i-ther - an intelligent 'ether'. Ghosts, apparitions and materialisations are 'ethereal/i-thereal' and the afterlife itself consists of 'ethereal/i-thereal' beings. At the moment of death the consciousness passes from the mind/brain to the i-ther and we live on. Voila!
Michael Bentine had a similar idea (Doors of the Mind / The Door Marked Summer) in that he imagined that when we die we enter a kind of universal or global consciousness: if I can quote Neil Peart (Rush) in his lyrics to Cygnus:X1 part 2, "I have memory and awareness but I have no shape or form". So it's not a new idea by any means, it's just that it seems science is getting closer to this theory being accepted as fact. And that's it in a nutshell. There are some transcripts of various psychic sittings, seances and materialisations in this book and I am happy to believe that these are reported correctly and so I am inclined to accept the testimony as truth.
So what am I saying about this book? Don't pick it up expecting to be reassured or comforted about your own mortality. I don't think it's well written, I think it strings the substance out far too long in order to make a book. But that said, the words in the title after the colon are accurate and that's exactly what you get - an investigation. Nothing more.
Am I disappointed? Yes, but I rather think that's my own fault.
I am interested in the subject matter, who isn't! But I'm on something like page 70 now and still haven't come across the point of this book. Surely the way to do this is to grab the reader immediately with case histories and hard evidence to support the assertion that there is life after death. That's what I want to hear, that's why I picked the book up, but it's almost like the author has only a very few snippets of information and needs to string it out and delay the reveal as long as possible in order to justify a book rather than a leaflet. I'll finish it, but ... really?
Ok, let me save you time and heartache here. The whole point in picking this book up is in the very last chapter. Here it is: current scientific thinking accepts the possibility of a 'substance' at a sub-atomic level (a quantum substance I guess you'd call it) which quite literally infiltrates everything and joins it all together into a continuum. With me so far? Right, this substance has been labelled, according to this book, the i-ther - an intelligent 'ether'. Ghosts, apparitions and materialisations are 'ethereal/i-thereal' and the afterlife itself consists of 'ethereal/i-thereal' beings. At the moment of death the consciousness passes from the mind/brain to the i-ther and we live on. Voila!
Michael Bentine had a similar idea (Doors of the Mind / The Door Marked Summer) in that he imagined that when we die we enter a kind of universal or global consciousness: if I can quote Neil Peart (Rush) in his lyrics to Cygnus:X1 part 2, "I have memory and awareness but I have no shape or form". So it's not a new idea by any means, it's just that it seems science is getting closer to this theory being accepted as fact. And that's it in a nutshell. There are some transcripts of various psychic sittings, seances and materialisations in this book and I am happy to believe that these are reported correctly and so I am inclined to accept the testimony as truth.
So what am I saying about this book? Don't pick it up expecting to be reassured or comforted about your own mortality. I don't think it's well written, I think it strings the substance out far too long in order to make a book. But that said, the words in the title after the colon are accurate and that's exactly what you get - an investigation. Nothing more.
Am I disappointed? Yes, but I rather think that's my own fault.
August 15, 2020
Very interesting read and well researched.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews