Aryana Libris

Author : Stevenson Ian
Title : Where reincarnation and biology intersect
Year : 1997

Link download : Stevenson_Ian_-_Where_reincarnation_and_biology_intersect.zip

Preface. This book introduces and condenses a much longer one entitled Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. That work is a medical monograph with extensive documentation, references, numerous tables, and many footnotes. This book has none of these. I have written it to satisfy the needs of readers who wish to understand the essential content of the larger work without troubling themselves over details. Let it be read as a series of abstracts. A good abstract in a scientific journal excites the reader's interest and entices him or her to read the complete article it summarizes. If this book persuades readers to study its parent monograph, I shall have succeeded in what I intended it to do. A reader can only fairly judge the kinds of cases these books describe by close attention to their many details; and I do not believe anyone should express an opinion about my conclusions without having met this condition. This may seem censorious; but I say it to emphasize that the present work does not fully deploy the evidence in the cases. What readers have here are brutally shortened summaries. As I have omitted many strengths, so 1 have left out many weaknesses. The larger work presents in detail descriptions of flaws and discrepancies in the testimony of informants and defects in the investigations of the cases. Here all roughness has been smoothed out, not for deception but solely for brevity. (The few exceptions where I have mentioned weaknesses in the cases touch on details that seem to me especially important.) I often give the subject's birth date (or the year of birth), but otherwise I rarely mention dates except when one is relevant to a particular feature of the case, such as when a birthmark was examined or a photograph taken. Because this book was printed after the monograph, I was able to add to it a few items of additional information about one case that I received too late for inclusion in the monograph. (This is the case of Ma Myint Myint Zaw in Chapter 12.) I have also clarified a discrepancy that remains without comment in the monograph. Otherwise, apart from the drastic abbreviation, the contents of this book correspond to those of the monograph. ...