Life on the Other Side: A Psychic's Tour of the Afterlife

Bestselling psychic Sylvia Browne offers a detailed account of life in heaven in Life on the Other Side. Readers should be warned that it takes a huge leap of faith to follow this celebrity psychic across the chasm of doubt to the other side. In her opening chapters she explains that she is like the young boy in the movie The Sixth Sense--she sees dead people. When she was a child, these spirits came into her room at night and disappeared when a light went on. "To this day I can't sleep in a completely dark room, because the minute I try it the room starts filling up," she writes. "As a child, it was scary. As an adult, it's just annoying..."

Once she establishes her lengthy connections to life after death (including conversations with a spirit guide named Francine and her own near-death experience), Browne launches into life in the fourth dimension. In a chapter titled "After the Tunnel, Arriving on the Other Side," Browne explains that newcomers pass through a "hall of wisdom" and then review their most recent life through a "scanning machine." In the chapter "Beyond the Entrance," Brown claims that spirits live in whatever kind of home they've longed for, or they recreate a favorite home from earth. Plus, "the more spiritually advanced we become, the more physical beauty we're given, as a badge of our progress and hard work." Sex is known as "merging" and does not require birth control or any commitments of exclusivity. These kinds of glowing accounts of the other side cause skeptics to snicker, believers to feel comforted, and thousands of fans to keep on buying her books. --Gail Hudson