Rating: 
Summary: A Weird and Wondrous Book!
Review: A diabolically wild collaboration between Daniel ( "Ishmael") Quinn and one of my favorite science fiction authors Tom ("Roithamer's Universe") Whalen. I've never ever seen a book like this one. It's a compendium of the Afterlife, but an Afterlife unlike any I have read about before. There are "do's and don't's," concerns concerning Zeno's paradoxes and particle physics, and even summaries of books written in the Afterlife by Asimov, Nabokov, Trakl, Arthur Godfrey, Lucy Terry (the first African- American poet), and Nikola Tesla. Also, check out the great photo-collages by Greg Boyd (of Asylum Press fame). A weird and wondrous book. How in the world did the authors trick Bantam into publishing such a delight!
Rating: 
Summary: Hey up there! Louder! (And funnier...)
Review: Ahh, well. Judging by the other reviews, this is a "cult classic" by one of those guys who figures out how to write cult classics and then makes a career of it. As a professional outsider I hadn't a snowball's chance in...the afterlife.The book is plainly intended to be funny, and I had the intuition that the authors were lampooning something--but I still have no clue exactly what they're poking fun of. The Tibetan Book of the Dead? H. L. Gold's American Book of the Dead (or whatever it's called)? Both are on my list but I want to learn Gaelic and German first, and that may take awhile. Without any grasp of the context within which this work exists, I can only call it shallow, mean-spirited, and worst of all, boring. Self-indulgence at its worst. Save your money--or learn a foreign language instead.
Rating:
Summary: Borges meets Barthelme
Review: Borges meets Barthelme and on their way encounter the spirits of Nabokov, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and other masters of metafiction. Fans of Daniel Quinn's didactic books with their questionable anthropology will likely not know what has hit them. Fans of Quinn as an iconoclast and of imaginative postmodern fiction at its finest will be delighted.
Rating:
Summary: Save your money.
Review: Daniel Quinn is lucky to have Ted Turner as his patron. This book is a waste of time, money and paper (all of which Quinn should be sensitive to). Spiritually it is empty. Metaphysically it is absurd, and comically it is not funny. I had hoped for much more.
Rating:
Summary: Caution: Fantastic, comic fiction!
Review: Did you know that in the afterlife a wind storm can leave your brain in such a shamble that you believe yourself a bicycle? That Borges completes after his death his Biography of the Infinite? That afterlife physicists Rotnac and Rekcur believe the other side is an anti-universe composed in part of charmed anti-quarks? Neither did I, but that's what I learned in this decidedly nutty, bizarre, fantastic, comic fiction. Quinn and Whalen have constructed the craziest, cleverest book I've read since, say, Queneau's Exercises in Style or O'Brien's wacky afterlife novel The Third Policeman. The authors perform their magic with a straight face, but don't be deceived--this is anything but a straight book.
Rating:
Summary: A waste of good reading time.
Review: Don't bother with this book by Quinn,it is nothing like previous works. I found it a total waste of my time.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointed
Review: Having read Ishmael, The Story of B, and After Dachau, I thought I knew what I was getting into with this book. I should have done my research. Perhaps if Daniel Quinn had provided a more accurate introduction (or not written one at all) I would have been able to take something from this book. As it is, I spent a too much time distracted by the thought that maybe, just maybe, he meant what he said and this was the result of a dream coupled with the extreme coincidence of his collaboration with Tom Whalen. My time would have been better served reading this book the way I know I would have had I not read his intro -- ignoring the vivid but useless description of the "physical" characteristics of this invented afterlife, and focusing on the message. Even with that in mind, I think Quinn has missed his mark here. There's certainly a good dose of creativity and some humor, and it paints a fascinating picture, but in the end I feel like I wasted my time. I can certainly think of better ways to impart dribbles of philosophy -- perhaps if he had spent less time describing the fantasy and more time actually trying to make a point, it would have been worthwhile. As it is, the "message" could easily be distilled into a single page, and we would all be much better for it.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: Having read Ishmael, The Story of B, and After Dachau, I thought I knew what I was getting into with this book. I should have done my research. Perhaps if Daniel Quinn had provided a more accurate introduction (or not written one at all) I would have been able to take something from this book. As it is, I spent a too much time distracted by the thought that maybe, just maybe, he meant what he said and this was the result of a dream coupled with the extreme coincidence of his collaboration with Tom Whalen. My time would have been better served reading this book the way I know I would have had I not read his intro -- ignoring the vivid but useless description of the "physical" characteristics of this invented afterlife, and focusing on the message. Even with that in mind, I think Quinn has missed his mark here. There's certainly a good dose of creativity and some humor, and it paints a fascinating picture, but in the end I feel like I wasted my time. I can certainly think of better ways to impart dribbles of philosophy -- perhaps if he had spent less time describing the fantasy and more time actually trying to make a point, it would have been worthwhile. As it is, the "message" could easily be distilled into a single page, and we would all be much better for it.
Rating: 
Summary: Suprising, entertaining, and all in all a fun expirence
Review: I am a huge fan of Daniel Quinn's, and this was something completely unexpected, but thourghly enjoyed. A very diffrent and altogether lighthearted veiw of the afterlife, and it's inhabitents. A must read for anybody... because were all going to die, and we need guidence once it happens.
Rating:
Summary: Charm, beauty, and wonder are abundant within.
Review: I am more familiar with the works of Tom Whalen than Daniel Quinn, and I find in this beautifully designed book much evidence that Tom's vision prevailed or at least persisted. Not one to follow a straight line when a crooked one ambles into delightful junctures, Tom explores whimsically our perplexedness in the face and certainty of the beyond. After we shuffle off this mortal coil, what happens to our spirits? And so Quinn and Whalen imagine a book that provides such answers. All in all, it is a brief work, perhaps owing some of its approach to similar guides to one's finances or health. But such guides are never as elegant as the "Little Book," to say the least. Finally, I will observe that this work, while offbeat, somehow manages in its humor to possess an elegiac quality. Thus the reader is not meant to read the book through like a novel, but to leaf through it slowly, pretending along with its authors that these slightly or extremely odd answers make sense. Why not these as much as some others we have already been told? Knowledge as charm or the charm of knowledge. Clutch this little book close. While the meaning of life may be elusive and the meaning of death equally inexact, what to do while "engaged" by it is another matter!
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