A neurosurgeon’s first-person account of his near-death experience after an E. coli meningitis-related seizure and seven-day coma will reassure afterlife believers, though it is unlikely to convince skeptics. Alexander’s credentials are impressive: medical school at Duke and 15 years at Harvard-affiliated hospitals. But to agnostics and atheists, Alexander may not come across as a completely objective observer.
He writes that he attended his Episcopal church even as he questioned how God, heaven, and an afterlife could exist, yet the heaven he describes seeing certainly seems like a biblical one; a typical line is, “the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above.”