Review
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Title: 100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife
Author: Ken Jennings
Publisher: Scribner
Year Published: 2023
Pages: 291
Format: Hardback
Genre: Trivia
ISBN: 9781501131585
Price: $27.99
Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association for Mormon Letters
Ken Jennings, Jeopardy host and champion, king of trivia, author of several bestsellers about trivia, and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has written a new book of trivia about the afterlife. In 100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife, Jennings attempts to capture the beliefs and theology of 100 different versions of the afterlife. These are the afterlives of mythology, religion, books, movies, television, and more. Tongue in cheek, Jennings formats his book as a travel guide, including Don’t Miss sites, What to Eat, Best-to-avoid hints, and Where-to Stay clues.
Ranging from Milton’s Paradise Lost through Greek mythology to TV’s The Good Place, Jennings devotes only about two or three pages to each afterlife. As you might guess, these are not deep dives. After all, it’s a trivia book, so the waters are shallow everywhere. Despite that, 100 Places to See After You Die can be an entertaining read. Jenning’s style is breezy and readable, and there’s no annoying endnotes or footnotes here. What you see is what you get. “I’ll take Dante’s Circles of Hell for $400, Ken!”
If you are reading for sheer amusement, there is a lot to like. For example, Jennings notes the irony that in Dante’s Christian view of the afterlife, so many of the characters described are from pagan mythology. In Emmanuel Swedenborg’s vision of hell, the damned torment each other. In other words, it’s a “vast internet forum, trolling itself forever.” Roman Catholicism “closed” Limbo in 2007, banished by Pope Benedict XVI. Saehrimner, the great wild boar of Asgard in Norse mythology, gets roasted every day, and reincarnated every night, so you never go hungry in Valhalla. If you get confused about how to navigate the afterlife of Beetlejuice, there is a convenient copy of the Handbook for the Recently Deceased to consult.
Jennings even writes about his own Mormon afterlife, with this introduction:
Most visions of the world to come…promise endless leisure and luxury. But not so the afterlife envisioned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As befits their peach-canning, carpool-driving, casserole-delivering image as the industrious honeybees of the American West, Mormons head to the grave prepared to keep on working. [p 82]
Such a statement is long on stereotype, so when Jennings describes the Three Kingdoms of Glory or the Buddhist afterlife, you may suspect that there is more to the story. However, because this is a book on afterlife trivia, you shouldn’t expect a lot of detail. This is likely true for all of the 100 afterlives Jennings writes about. If you are looking for more thoughtful treatments, read (or view) the source material. There are no academic pretensions here, no deep theological musings, no fear of drowning in imponderable depths. It’s simply a fun read, a read where you won’t feel guilty about not reading the entire book in one sitting.