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By Julian Barnes
244 pp, $24.95
New York, NY, Knopf Publishing Group, 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-3072-6963-8

JAMA. 2008;300(24):2922-2923.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

"Men, commonplace and ordinary, do not seem to me fit for the tremendous fact of eternal life," the novelist W. Somerset Maugham wrote in 1902. "With their little passions, their little virtues and their little vices, they are well enough suited in the workaday world; but the conception of immortality is much too vast for beings cast on so small a scale." As a young medical student, Maugham had watched patients die. "Never have I seen in their last moments anything to suggest that their spirit was everlasting," he wrote. "They die as a dog dies."

Julian Barnes posits objections to Maugham's thought: "1. Dogs, too, are part of God's creation. . . . 2. Why should a doctor, concentrating on the body, notice where the spirit is? 3. Why should the inadequacy of man preclude the possibility of a spiritual afterlife? Who are we to decide that we are not worthy? Isn't the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Stephen Bates, JD, Reviewer
Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
stephen.bates@unlv.edu

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