Pelicans and the Science of Souls

Rebecca Coffey has spent more than thirty years as a science journalist, writing about subjects ranging from biology and chemistry to physics. She is also an illustrator.

She met the love of her life when she was 65 and he was 74. He was noted Plato scholar Gerald A. Press. In the few years that they were together, they experienced happiness and safety in a measure neither had known before. Healthy in both spirit and body, they were planning a City Hall wedding. Then, in the early hours of the morning right after a quiet, splendid Christmas, she found him dead.

When his life ended she felt that hers had, too.

In the days and months that followed, Rebecca found herself confronting extraordinary experiences. She wondered if Jerry was trying to communicate with her. True to the habits of mind that guided her career as a journalist, she neither accepted the experiences as evidence of an afterlife nor dismissed them as products of grief. Instead, she did what she always did as a journalist: she set out to investigate.

Her research led her into ancient Greek ideas about soul and consciousness that Jerry had devoted his career to teaching, as well as into an examinatin of what modern physics has revealed—and has yet to explain—about quantum entanglement. Along the way, Rebecca continued drawing a collection of whimsical pelicans that she had started as a gift for him before he died. 

From those illustrations and her research emerged Pelicans and the Science of Souls, an illustrated memoir in which personal experience, philosophy, science, and more than forty original illustrations illuminate one another. For readers who appreciate thoughtful writing about questions that resist easy answers, Pelicans and the Science of Souls offers a raw and deeply heartfelt tale.

We all reach moments when life no longer fits the story we have been telling ourselves. Rebecca did. Rather than turning away, she kept looking. This book is the record of that search. Publication date: January 12, 2027. Pre-sales here.

Pelicans and the Science of Souls

By: Rebecca Coffey

Available January 12, 2027. Pre-sales here.

Publisher: Beck & Branch

Distributed by Itasca Books. Available through Ingram Content Group. 

9” × 9” paperback. 120 pages. 39 color illustrations; 2 black-and-white. 

ISBN 979-8-9932607-2-3