Why this book: I’ve always been interested in The Unseen Order of Things and have found the idea of reincarnation an interesting possibility.  I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the topic since reading the (now discredited) Search for Bridie Murphy, and visiting the Association for Research and Enlightenment in my home town of Virginia Beach, Va.  It’s hard to explain what Edgar Cayce was able to know, see, and do without at least considering the ‘truth’ of his claim of reincarnation and the evolution of the soul.

My Impressions:  The book tells the story of a young child who has uncanny knowledge of and interest in airplanes.  He also has nightly recurrent nightmares, in which he screams something to the effect, “Plane on fire! Plane on fire! Little man can’t get out!” during which he thrashes around and screams in his crib.    With this nightmare ocurring almost nightly, during the day, this young child makes statements about what airplane he used to fly, the aircraft carrier that he flew off of , the Pacific battle he fought in – history of which  his parents were unaware and to which this 3 year old boy had  never been exposed.  The father was a Christian with very strong traditional beliefs and embarked on a campaign of research to basically discredit this ‘fantasy’ by finding flaws and historical inaccuracies in his son’s story.  The book is largely about his extensive research, about the strain it put on the marriage of the parents, as well as about the mounting evidence that this young boy knew things that were very difficult to explain without believing in reincarnation.   The father learned the identity of the young naval aviator who the boy claimed to be when he was shot down, found friends and family whose names the boy mentioned.  The extensive research allowed them to introduce their 5 year old son to the people who were close to and still had vivid memories of the naval aviator who had died in 1945.  The boy knew things about this earlier man that people said only the man himself knew.  The stories are amazing, but the book is almost as much about the father’s struggle with his faith, and how the parents coped with this very inconvenient and awkward prediliction of their son.  My wife Mary Anne and I were a bit put off in reading so much about the parents, but in the end, the story was almost as much about them and what this story did to them as it was about a young boy who apparently had vivid and verifiable memories of a previous life.  There was a dateline story on this case several years ago that can still be viewed on-line.   Yes, after I got over learning more about the parents than I wanted to know, I very much liked the book.