The new book “100 Places to See After You Die,” written by “Jeopardy!” champion and host Ken Jennings, surveys ideas about what happens to us after we die ranging from mythology and religion to ideas floated in books, movies and TV shows.
I met Jennings at the cemetery on a sunny April day to talk about his new book, which is all about the afterlife. If that sounds unexpected, it all started at an airport bookstore. “I saw one of those bucket list travel books,” he said. “I was looking at it upside down, and I thought it said ‘A Thousand Destinations to Die Before You See.’ I came out of the bookstore and I told my friends at the gate, ‘I think I have an idea for a book.’”,” which Scribner is publishing Tuesday.
Jennings has been interested in death and the afterlife for as long as he can remember. Part of his interest when he was a child stemmed from the fact that he hadn’t yet experienced any deeply personal losses. “And so,” he said, “a lot of my formative experiences with death were fictional characters, like Spock dying, Mr. Hooper dying, Jean Grey from the X-Men. That’s the kind of American experience with death. You talk about it more with Big Bird than with your own loved ones sometimes.
Jennings does some of his most entertaining writing in the less-devout sections of the book: those that address how literature, movies and TV have dealt with the subject. One example is his account of the movie “.
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