Lisa Miller's Heaven: A Comprehensive Overview That Will Leave You Wanting More

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife. Lisa Miller. Harper's. 2010. 368 pages

Lisa Miller's recent work Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife is a guide book for those interested in the many existing doctrines of heaven and their histories. I consider it almost a travel book, as you follow along while the author visits various places to meet people considered authorities in their fields. The body of the work is mostly interviews. These are accompanied by appropriate background details to give you context and a better understanding of the subject matter. The book is also peppered with personal anecdotes and abundant quotations from literature and critical works on heaven, from the ancient to the contemporary.

From Evangelical preachers to Quran scholars, Miller covers the topic of heaven with sufficient breadth while not straying from her goal as a journalist. Ultimately, Heaven is an extremely interesting research project that will provide you with exhaustive information and opinions, meant to whet your appetite instead of answer all your questions. While Heaven will educate you, the book's goal is rather to provide the reader with the numerous sources and outlets available on the subject of heaven. The appendix notes alone offer hundreds of extra references to explore (75 pages worth to be exact). Miller is able to incorporate these many references while maintaining a compelling narrative throughout the book, a feat that is no doubt aided by her extensive career in religious journalism.

Miller cannot completely deny her personality and beliefs from coming through the work, so it cannot be called truly unbiased. However, her individual opinions do not prevent the reader from interpreting the information for themselves. Heaven will assist in answering some of the questions you might have while provoking deeper thought and inspiring new questions. Miller helps inform you and direct you to other sources for further study.

Heaven is a wonderful manuscript because it will satisfy those who want a general overview on the subject as well as arouse a desire for even more information. Reading Heaven will leave you feeling educated but beware; it will also make you want to read Dante, Greek mythology and associated works such as A.E. McGrath's A Brief History of Heaven. The subject of heaven affects our culture so vastly, in our artwork, our advertising, our morality and our experience of loss and grief. Miller's Heaven touches on all of these aspects and more. The book cannot possibly address all of these in depth, but it certainly provides us with the tools in which to do so, in a note-worthy and appealing way.

Shenadoah Butterworth is Spero's arts reviewer.