c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Tom Shroder’s earlier book, a whodunit he edited while editor of the Miami Herald’s Tropics magazine, went for the belly laugh. “Naked Came the Manatee” started with a chapter by humorist Dave Barry and was continued as a serial by 12 additional writers over 13 weeks in the magazine. It lumbered whimsically onto the New York Times best-seller list in 1996.

Shroder’s new book, “Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives,” is being pitched at an utterly different realm. It delivers 250 serious pages exploring claims of reincarnation.

The author traveled to India and Lebanon to delve into cases of children who say they were reborn. The dust jacket describes Shroder moving from “skepticism to awe,” concluding there is plenty in the universe we don’t understand.

“It has been a real emotional drama in my life,” Shroder said over the telephone from his Washington, D.C., office, where he edits the Sunday Style section of the Washington Post. “I engaged these cases almost as a curiosity and when I found I was unable to dismiss them, well, that was more difficult for me to face than I thought.”

Shroder, 45, writes that his world view was upended by the accumulated testimony of very young children who insisted, over and over, “I am not Bashir or Suzanne or Daniel; you are not my parents; this is not my home.”

The case that most affected the author involved a young Lebanese woman, Suzanne Ghanem. From the age of 16 months, she would grab a telephone, urgently asking, “Hello? Leila?” By age 2, the toddler was insisting her real name was Hanan, that she had three grown children, as well as a husband, parents and brothers _ listing 13 names in all.

These names corresponded to the life of Hanan Mansour, a woman who died at age 36 after heart surgery in Richmond, Va. Just before the operation, she had tried to telephone her daughter, Leila, whose lost passport prevented her from flying from Venezuela to Richmond to be at her mother’s sickbed.

“When I met her, Suzanne was 25 years old, and she still seemed to be pining for her (Hanan Mansour’s) husband, even though he had been remarried for decades,” Shroder said. “And though the husband’s family, very prominent, was trying to suppress the case to avoid embarrassment, I could see he had real concern for this young girl.”

Shroder said he was moved by the ordinariness of these rebirth claims and the family havoc they caused. This wasn’t Shirley MacLaine being outlandish. This was a 7-year-old girl named Preeti, outside Delhi, India, insisting she belonged in another family even though her father hit her for it.

“It wasn’t what I expected,” Shroder said. “The people weren’t exotic. They were very matter-of-fact. It was all so human. Parents with kids who wouldn’t shut up about all this. Kids who cared much more about their other families than whether anyone believed them.”

Shroder first tangled with the question of reincarnation as editor of the Miami Herald’s Tropics magazine. He wrote a piece on Brian Weiss, a Florida psychiatrist whose book “Many Lives, Many Masters” appeared in 1988 and became a New Age classic. Shroder didn’t put much stock in Weiss’ argument for past life regressions, but the research led him to Dr. Ian Stevenson, whose work was more difficult to discount.

Stevenson, a University of Virginia professor of psychiatry, became Shroder’s guide through Hindu India and Druze Lebanon. A large part of Shroder’s book is dedicated to Stevenson’s work, his scientific isolation and quiet doggedness in trying to verify or rule out almost 3,000 cases of these children’s claims.”In the West people say, `Why are you spending the money to study reincarnation when we know it’s impossible?’ In the East they say, `Why are you spending money to study reincarnation when we know it’s a fact?”’ Stevenson muses in the book.

Nevertheless, one in four Americans believes in reincarnation, according to a recent Gallup poll. The idea comes in many versions, but generally holds that when the body dies, the human soul passes into another body or animal. The Hindu, Buddhist and Druze traditions embrace the notion. Classic Islam, Christianity and Judaism do not, although musings about reincarnation crop up in the writings of some mystics.

Professor Lawrence Krauss, chairman of the Case Western Reserve University physics department, is not surprised that most rebirth claims come out of cultures with a religious framework to accommodate them.

“From the perspective of the laws of nature, reincarnation is ludicrous,” said Krauss, author of “The Physics of Star Trek” and a champion of the scientific method. “There are a lot of ways to trick researchers. None of these studies are done with careful controls, or double-blinded. None are repeatable.

“I always hesitate to say someone is lying a priori. It is more likely these people are deluding themselves that they are remembering a past life.”

Shroder knows these arguments well. His book looks at the limits of Stevenson’s work, which lacks a testable hypothesis, a controlled experiment, an outcome reproducible by others.

“I am still reluctant to say this is reincarnation, for all the very good reasons discussed: Where’s the soul? What’s the mechanism? How could this possibly work?” Shroder said. “Even though no unaccountable phenomena happened, no burning bush began communicating in a clear, loud voice, I personally concluded that this stuff was beyond coincidence.”

Stevenson himself said he wished Shroder had been more cautious, even though he praised the book. “He left the reader with the impression that the case of (an American boy) is solved, that is, verified,” Stevenson said from his office in Charlottesville, Va. “It is not, and I told Tom of this, but he did not change his text. This is the most serious error.”

“My story was appropriately inconclusive, but evocative,” Shroder said.

Although the author takes the metaphysical seriously, it hasn’t brought him closer to any faith tradition. His wife, Lisa Shroder, to whom the book is dedicated, said it has not changed her Christian Science beliefs.

“I personally have long believed that there are all these great mysteries in life and we are given clues,” Lisa Shroder said.

DEA END LONG