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Spook

Science Tackles the Afterlife

By Bernadette Quigley, Mary Roach

(13)

| Others | 9781597378833

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Book Description

“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 laptop?”

In an attempt to find out, Mary RoContinue

“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 laptop?”

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.

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

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