I have a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It mostly focusing on how the living deal with death - as in, if someone dies how this is managed.

I suspect the book you mention may play of that position?

I also have a copy of that book! its fascinating, but I haven't had a chance to read closely yet.

I can't compare them because I haven't read either in full yet, but it's my impression that this book isn't about how the family survives the death of a loved one, as important a topic as that is. It's about consciousness surviving the death of the body (though in a very qualified way)

I’m interested to hear what you make of it. Not interested in reading it though.

I'll use this picture as a 'main post' signal, if necessary. It's a close-up from the book's cover, a painting by El Greco called The Entombment of Gonzalo Ruiz, Count of Orgaz, from a Legend of 1323. I think it's a good 'main post' signal in two ways: (1) it has a close tie to the book & (2) it's big & striking. It'll jump out if you scroll down through a thicket of nested arguments.

Ok, onto the book itself: Johnston, naturally, has introductory remarks.

Introductory remarks are hard to distill, because they are already distillations. But here's at it:

He says there are two problematic paths to travel down. The first is preaching, repeating religious dogma. The second is the mere rehearsal of materialist dogma - i.e. 'consciousness is just the brain, of course, how could it be otherwise?'

He thinks this strict either-or has bad effects. The first is that it funnels those members of the general public who aren't partial to either of those two dogmas toward impoverished "new age" thought. If there is no good option for people who don't recognize themselves in either sheer religiosity or strict materialist dogma, they'll gravitate toward snake-oil spiritualism.

The other problem, related, is that he thinks this framing feeds into the clunky Science vs Religion debate. [It seems to me like what he's rejecting here is easy, snarky 'this vs that' frameworks of the kind you'd see in either glib pop science or glib religious rejections of science]