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Spook

Science Tackles the Afterlife

By Mary Roach

(13)

| Hardcover | 9780393059625

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Book Description

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 Continue

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.

Critics

  • Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

    Mary Roach knows lots of things, but not necessarily, it would seem, about life. As the author of ' Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers', she spent a lot of time finding out about, well, not death, exactly, but rather, what happens to human bo ... (read full critics)

    bookotron published on Mon, 13 Sep 2010

  • Bookreporter.com - SPOOK: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach

    Perhaps it's best to try defining this oddball book by what it is not. It is not a serious scientific study; it is not a piece of gallows humor; it is not a work with religious implications; it is not an exercise in debunking; it does not champion on ... (read full critics)

    bookreporter published on Sun, 29 Aug 2010

2 Reviews

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  • 1 person find this helpful

    Really enjoyable reading. It's about the ways that science has attempted to prove the existence of an afterlife and/or a soul, but it's mostly about the ways that science has failed.

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    Hold Your Spin said on Dec 30, 2007 about the Paperback edition | 1 feedback

  • Although the author never comes to a satisfying conclusion, I still enjoyed this book. Enough science to keep me interested presented in a "pop culture" way that kept me reading.

    Is this helpful?

    Marsha said on Jan 27, 2012 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

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9780393059625 Hardcover $24.95 $21.33 bn.com
$24.95 $13.59 The Book Depository
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