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Search - Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
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Book Description:
"Equal parts Groucho Marx and Stephen Jay Gould, both enlightening and entertaining."—Sunday Denver Post & Rocky Mountain NewsMembers who requested this book also requested:
The best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now trains her considerable wit and curiosity on the human soul. What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?" In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive. 10 illustrations.
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Top Member Reviews
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
Funny in some places, a tad boring in some places, but over all, a good read. I found the chapter on ectoplasm more than just a little interesting and more than a little bit gross.
CM C. (
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
I love Mary Roach's writing. I didn't like the topic, though, so this was a love/hate reading. I struggled to finish the book. Her first book, Stiff, was a better topic to bumble about. But... I guess the afterlife is tough to describe, huh?
Jessica M. (
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
This book had a lot of potential, but it fell a bit short of meeting my high expectations. Some chapters were really interesting, and I truly loved the author's subtle touches of humor. But other chapters just dragggged. Overall, it's an interesting read, but you might want to prepare yourself to skim through (or even skip) a few of the sections.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
Interesting look at the efforts to scientifically investigate the existence of an afterlife. Seemed a bit lightweight, I preferred her previous book Stiff.
Renee C. (
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
If you will be offended by her mocking tone toward God near the beginning of the book, then you might want to avoid this. If you can set that aside, the book is quite fascinating and at some points laugh out loud funny.
Rate These Member Reviews
Vanessa V. (Interesting topic, and the logical follow-up to her previous book, Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. But I thought the title was rather misleading; perhaps "Soul" or "Spirit" would have been more apt. And that misnomer lead to my greatest frustration with the book, I thought it would be more about ghosts, hauntings, that side of the afterlife. Roach's quips are out in-force in this book, more than the gently humor she shows in STiff, and the book is actually less enjoyable as a result. Her humor is always biting, but seldom appropriate and often distracting. Still, the majority of the book, about 70%, was highly entertaining and educational.
An exploration of life after death by a comedy science writer. I thoroughly enjoyed this and am now reading Passage by Connie Willis.
A pop-science book about the research behind paranormal activity
Maya B. from BRISTOL, CT wrote on 4/5/2007...An enjoyable, sceptical approach to the question of life after death.
Jessica W. from HOUSTON, TX wrote on 3/19/2007...From Publisher's Weekly:
Roach made an exceptional debut two years ago with Stiff—it might seem a hard act to follow. Yet she has done it again: after her study of what becomes of our mortal coil after death, she now presents an equally smart, quirky, hilarious look at whether there is a soul that survives our physical demise. Roach perfectly balances her skepticism and her boundless curiosity with a sincere desire to know. She ranges into the oddest nooks and crannies of both science and belief (and scientists who believe), regaling the reader with tales of Duncan Macdougall, a respected surgeon who weighed consumptives at their moment of death to see if the escaping soul could be measured in ounces, and of female mediums who, during séances, extruded a substance called ectoplasm from their private parts (she even examines a piece of alleged ectoplasm archived at Cambridge University). She goes to school to learn to be a medium, subjects her brain to electromagnetic waves to see if they induce the experience of seeing ghosts and joins a group trying to record sounds made by the spirits of the Donner party. The text is littered with footnotes: tangential but delicious tidbits that Roach clearly couldn't bear to leave out. She is an original who can enliven any subject with wit, keen reporting and a sly intelligence.
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Marissa A. from LANCASTER, CA wrote on 2/23/2007...Filled with interesting information, but I felt it was not relevent to me, so I have decided to part with it.
An interesting account of the history of research on the soul.