Book Review: Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot (2009). Bruce & Andrea Leininger.

Soul Survivor is the story of a modern boy from Texas who had detailed and accurate memories of life and death as a World War II fighter pilot, starting with terrifying dreams at night of burning up and falling that began before he even learned to talk. 

This was the first account I had read about the strange and widespread phenomenon of small children with apparent memories of past lives.  It is considered by experts in this field to be one of the most thoroughly researched and documented of thousands of these cases that have been collected and studied now for more than 70 years. 

It is also very powerfully told, through the experiences of the child’s parents, as they began to piece together the meaning of what their son was saying to them and doing in his early childhood, and then slowly validated dozens of specific factual statements made by their son about his memories of his previous life as a young fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, despite their own resistance to accepting as true what they were hearing from him, and their own religious discomfort at the outset with the whole idea of reincarnation.

Most of the books I have read by now on this topic concern the work of two eminent psychiatrists at the University of Virginia Medical School, Dr. Ian Stevenson (who began the study of this phenomenon in the 1970s, and worked on it throughout his long career there, traveling all over the world to gather case histories from different cultures), and Dr. Jim Tucker, who began as a student of Stevenson’s, then became an expert on the subject in his own right. 

Between the two of them, they continuously collected and studied thousands of case histories from around the world for more than fifty years.  Many of those cases, which they gathered with meticulous care under research protocols originally developed by Stevenson to screen out falsification and bias, are considered “solved”, which means they believe with a high degree of certainty that they have identified the past life (the person) to which the child subject refers, even though those people were not typically public figures or celebrities that would likely have been known to the child or the family involved.

The boy and family in Soul Survivor were not among their many astonishing cases, but as a starting point for reading about and understanding the phenomenon of children who remember past lives, it is excellent – moving, almost like a novel in style and persuasive enough to make you want to know more about it.  Very highly recommended.