The Hand on the Mirror

When former Sacramento Bee publisher Durham lost her husband, Max Besler, to cancer in 2004, her religious faith and journalism training left her open to the possibility of an afterlife but skeptical about it. She began encountering lights that flickered, clocks stopping at the time her husband passed away, and most astonishingly, powdery handprints on the first, second, and third anniversaries of his death. These experiences launched Durham, daughter of a Presbyterian minister, into conversations with scientists and spiritual practitioners in an effort to understand what she witnessed. She documents her experience and the many interviews she did to pose the possibility that “life does not end with our physical death” and to marshal public support for research into the topic. Durham is credible and sincere in her quest, and her personal insights into how love transcends a human lifetime are moving. However, the book is unlikely to appeal to more theologically conservative Christians who are interested in heaven, because it fails to address how this view of the afterlife coheres with what the Bible says about death and the soul. (Apr.)