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SCIENCE, THE SELF, AND SURVIVAL AFTER DEATH: SELECTED WRITINGS OF IAN STEVENSON, edited by Emily Williams Kelly. lanham, MD: Rowman & littlefield, 2013. Pp. 415. $65.00 (hard cover). ISBN: 978-1- 4422-2114-7.
Ian Stevenson is best known both within and outside parapsychology for his field studies of what he called cases of the reincarnation type, but these form only a part of his life-long struggle to understand how the mind and body relate to one another. That he left psychiatry for parapsychology is widely appre- ciated, but probably fewer people know that he specialized in psychosomatic medicine before psychiatry, and doubtless fewer still realize that he started out studying history. This welcome introduction to Steven- son's oeuvre constitutes an intellectual autobiography and is the first work to trace the development of his concerns over his professional life.
Emily Williams kelly decided against writing a traditional biography of Stevenson in favor of letting him speak in his own words. She is well-positioned for the task she set herself because she was Stevenson's research assistant and later colleague at the university of Virginia from 1978 until his death in 2007. her close acquaintance with the man and his writings shows in her selection of articles and her comments on them. She has chosen 34 pieces, some journal papers or commentaries, others book chapters. A few are reprinted in full, but most are excerpted to a lesser or greater degree. They are arranged in five sections with introductory remarks by kelly, who also contributes introductory and closing chapters. The book concludes with a comprehensive (although not definitive, if I may make the distinction) classified bibliography of Stevenson's publications.
Stevenson was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1918. His father was a Scottish political journalist, his mother an English devotee of Theosophy. In her "General Introduction," kelly describes Stevenson's early life, his study of history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and his switch to medicine at McGill University in Montreal. She sketches his medical career in the United States and his growing involvement in psychical research, the term he came to prefer for his branch of parapsychology.
Stevenson himself traces these steps in more detail in the first selection of his writings, a 1989 address entitled "Some of...