What they want you to know! by: Carter Shepard and Carolyn Cummings

What they want you to know!
Messages from beyond the grave.
By Carter Shepard and Carolyn Cummings
Cumming Press
ISBN 9780976706311

As a writer who has published nearly 200 book reviews in the last 3 years, I now daily receive offers of books from authors who have found here on my blog or my reviews on Imprint's website or Amazon.com or Amazon.ca. I usually look at all the offers and decide if it is a book I would be interested in reading or not, based upon the information they have included in their letter. I must have missed something big in the offer from this book. You see my reviews are broken down roughly as 50% Fiction, 15% Catholic, 10% Fiction, 10% History, 5% Fitness and Health, 5% Biography and 5% Tech manuals. So why would anyone think I would want to read a book by a psychic about supposed conversations with the dead?

What I was expecting from the write-up for the book, was gleaned wisdom from history figures' lives and how to live a better life. What the book is, is 18 supposed interviews with the dead historical figures through a medium. The book does provide a short biography for each of those 'interviewed'. The list includes Albert Einstein, Nicole Simpson, Ronald Reagan, Leonardo Da Vinci, Johnny Cash, Princess Diana, John Kennedy Jr., Princess Grace, Benjamin Franklin, Christopher & Dana Reeve, Jackie Kennedy, William Shakespeare, Audrey Hepburn, Howard Hughes, Natalie Wood, Steve Irwin, Abraham Lincoln and John Scudder. An impressive list of historical figures to have drop into your parlor for a conversation.

Most of the participants seem anxious to share their views on life, love and living with the authors. It is interesting to note that if the book is correct and they did have conversations with the dead, modern English is what is spoken in the afterlife. The book is also full of photos spanning the interviewees' lives.

I am not sure what to make of the book. It was interesting and somewhat fun to read these supposed stories. But that is coming from a point of view that believes that interviews like these cannot have taken place. If offered as true experience, as I believe the book is intended, I feel it is misguided and dangerous if however it is intended as fun and humourous then it is well done and worth a read. So I will leave it to your personal beliefs and persuasions as to whether you pick up this book or not. But buyer be warned - it might not be exactly what you're expecting.

(Fist Published in Across the Creek 2008-04-01 in the Book Look column.)