"The Star Rover is an imaginative flight into man's history, rendered in London's most realistic terms. It is the story of Darrell Standing, condemned to solitary confinement in a corrupt prison, who learns to free his soul from his body and escape his pain, to go winging off through space and time."-From dust jacket.

The story is told in the first person by a convict of San Quentin Prison (professor of agricultural science Standing Darrell) who had been sentenced to death penalty. For a long time Darrell had been in an individual cell where he had been tortured by so called “jacket”, a canvas cloth in which the whole body can be tightly laced, inducing angina. Looking for a method to mitigate the torture, Standing tries “the short death” (a kind of trance state) about which he found out from another prisoner while communicating by tapping. As a result, he travels among the stars and then experiences a lot of episodes of his past lives. The main part of the book contains the descriptions of the journeys to his old lives.

An incident at school forces sixth grader Phil Morelli, a white boy, to become aware of racial discrimination and segregation, and to seriously consider if he himself is prejudiced.

Reproduction of the original.

The Star Rover, is a collection of short stories revolves around the concept of reincarnation. It tells the story of San Quentin death-row inmate Darrell Standing, who escapes the horror of prison life -and long stretches in a straitjacket- by withdrawing into vivid memories of past lives, including incarnations as a French nobleman and an Englishman in medieval Korea. Based on the life and imprisonment of Jack London's friend Ed Morrell, this is one of the author's most complex and original works. Dealing with questions of reincarnation, out of body experiences and the potential of the human mind to transcend the physical body to explore other lives and the universe. This is considered by many the best novel describing the out of body experience or astral projection.

The Star Rover is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915 (published in the United Kingdom as The Jacket). It is science fiction, and involves both mysticism and reincarnation.A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina.