This book might be best described as the logical sequel to Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. After probing autopsies, the funeral home business, and the implications of human composting, it seems only natural that the author would turn her attention to the afterlife. To learn what she can about the Other Side, she enrolls in an English school for mediums; banters with reincarnation researchers; and interviews a Duke University professor about a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech.
Janet Maslin
How serious is Ms. Roach in wondering about life after death? Not very. She appears more concerned with comic effects than cosmic ones, and she is constantly on the lookout for entertainingly bizarre details and turns of phrase…Spook has great appeal on the basis of Ms. Roach's droll research. But it is afflicted with the same problem common to its spirit-world subjects: insubstantiality. Although she does her best to avoid what the book calls "the Big Shrug," she is not always able to learn much from the string of research outings described here.
—The New York Times
Kate Zernike
Roach is a wonderfully vivid writer and most fun when she is exploring the world of the modern soul-searchers. Spook, like Stiff, is a "who knew?" kind of book, and it's fascinating to discover that a researcher in the 21st century would be, say, trying to weigh the consciousness of a leech. And as a reporter, Roach has a keen eye for the perfect detail, an ear for the zinging quotation and a finely tuned sense of the preposterous…Spook is less about figuring out what science says about the afterlife than it is a celebration of the wide, occasionally crazy spectrum of human pursuit.
—The New York Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
Science writer Roach, having told all about cadavers in Stiff (2003), progresses to the logical next step: What happens after death?Her journey begins in India, where she tracks down stories of children purported to be reincarnations of dead relatives. Lots to debunk here. Then on to all-but-unbelievable experiments to weigh, see or tape-record the soul, as well as tales of celebrated mediums, spirit guides and ectoplasm. Did you know there are mediums being tested in university labs today, and that you can attend medium school in England? While researching this, Roach learned a good bit about human psychology of the "if you wanna believe it it's true" variety. She makes the point that, historically, investigators of the afterlife often capitalize on the latest scientific discoveries of new sources of energy so that they can be invoked to power a soul or, alternatively, explain away a phenomenon. Thus, the perception of ghosts might be due to some people's sensitivity to very low frequency "infrasound." One of her best ghost stories concerns a revised last will and testament whose discovery was attributed to a ghost telling his son where it could be found. The case went to trial and the ghost won. (There's a neat follow-up.) For all Roach's skeptical and often hilarious accounts, she is an eager volunteer and ready to accept evidence if evidence there be. Thus she reports that experiments are under way to study near-death experiences in which patients are briefly "killed" during surgery to implant defibrillators. If even one person reports seeing an image on a ceiling-mounted laptop in the O.R., whose screen faces the ceiling, she might be convinced. As it is, she admits to not "knowing,"but sort of believing in ghosts. Throughout, she is critical and witty-e.g., speaking of postmortem "recordings," she says there is one of Chopin, "who has, we learn, resumed composing following a short stint of decomposing."Truly deft handling of the (mostly) daft.
From the Publisher
"The general reader’s ideal emissary to the arcana of serious science. . . . Roach’s writing has what science has so far failed to find: a divine spark."— Malcolm Jones Newsweek
"Dependably witty, especially when it ventures far into the ether. . . . [Roach] makes a clever investigator and a thoroughly entertaining, if skeptical, tour guide."— Janet Maslin New York Times
"Investigative reporting has no lighter, more irreverent spirit than Mary Roach. . . . Spook is enormous fun."— David A Walton Pittsburgh Union-Tribune
"Surreal, fascinating, at times absurd and always hilarious, Mary Roach may not reveal the street address of our final destination, but in Spook she makes it sound less like a morgue and more like a comedy club."— Vince Darcangelo Boulder Weekly
"Reading Spook is like attending a lecture by a professor who is equal parts Groucho Marx and Stephen Jay Gould, both enlightening and entertaining."— Dorman T. Schindler Sunday Denver Post & Rocky Mountain News
