This book provides a good introduction to the work of Ian Stevenson, a man who qualifies for this database because he has devoted his professional life to the study of narrative. Stevenson's methodology involves listening to stories, comparing and contrasting variants of stories, and constructing long, detailed narratives that attempt to "capture" the complex experience of his informants, who claim to remember incidents from past lives. In this sense Stevenson's work is similar to that of ethnographers, cultural anthropologists, and folklorists.

The data is very impressive. Stevenson's work has nothing to do with (and long antedates) the deluge of remembered lives that constitutes one of the least endearing aspects of New Age culture. In fact, Stevenson's informants are children spontaneously remembering recent quite ordinary lives, as opposed to adults remembering under hypnosis romantic or heroic lives in the distant past. In addition, birthmarks that occur at the sites of injury in the previous life constitute an important part of Stevenson's evidence.

Shroder presents Stevenson as such an engaging storyteller that he tends to sweep away one's disbelief. Shroder presents the alternate explanations for these stories of "remembered lives." On the available evidence, alternate explanations do not seem likely, except for the inescapable fact that reincarnation is even less likely. For a good introduction to Ian Stevenson's own writings, see Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (University of Virginia Press, 1980) and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (Praeger Press, 1997).