One star is too much. I didn't know much about Sylvia Browne before I read this book, but I now know all I want or need to. This book left a distinct bad taste. The first 60 pages were devoted to chronicling the young Sylvia's social life and the succession of beaus that were supposedly in love with her, as well the various outfits she wore and how she styled her hair before going out on a date. Gifted or not, the whole book seemed boastful and conceited. Plus I really question the spirituality of a person that could dismiss her mother's death as "no real loss" and refer to her ex-husband as "evil" and proceed to slander him at every turn. She constantly wanders off in her anecdotes focusing more on details of crimes rather than psychic ability. This is a vanity book. Save your money and find something else to read.
The name Sylvia Brown sounded vaguely familiar to me when a friend of mine told me about this book and borrowed it to me so that I could read it. She grew up in a non-religious household and seemed eager for something to believe, and so she enthusiastically recommended it to me. I suppose I fit comfortably into that category of people that "believers" classify as "skeptics," and I am amazed by some of the reviews for this book that recommend it to all skeptics, saying that it will make a believer out of them. It will not.
If anything, it just strengthened my skepticism of this type of...belief system, if that's what one could call it. My biggest gripe about Sylvia's "religion" is that it tells gullible, grief-stricken people who have lost friends or relatives exactly what they want to hear. I don't think I could have come up with a more appealing, happy-ending scenario for life and death if I tried. But believing that you got a new car for Christmas just because that's what you really really wanted doesn't make it true.
Other gripes: I got the impression that Sylvia is somewhat (if not very) self-important. If she can't go and pick winning lottery numbers because you can't use your "gift" for selfish reasons, why not donate the money to charity? How can the surface of the "other side" be three feet above our own (that's why ghosts appear to float, of course) and infinite, whereas earth is of finite size? And what is with this whole New Age vibrational frequency thing anyway? What exactly is supposed to be vibrating?
If this is the best that the New Age religious/spiritual movement has to offer, I think I'll look elsewhere.
