Sum

Reading Eagleman's forty vignette-style tales, imaginings of what the afterlife could be like, I felt claustrophobic and bored. Much of the time he seemed to be trapped in the conventional ideas of a male God or gods as clumsy, aloof creators (only twice were they a female), traditional love between men and women as the centre of human connection, and the overused, stale concept of heaven and Hell. He also has a bad habit of anthropomorphizing everything from human cells to a solitary particle that created then un-created the entire universe. It felt juvenile and mostly silly, but not in a funny or clever way. I'm curious to read his nonfiction work in neuroscience. Maybe he shines a little brighter in this genre.
I like the concept of this book, which I thought had a lot of potential, but his execution was a chore to get through.