Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

by Mary Roach

Overview

The best-selling author of Stiff  and Bonk 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393069204
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/17/2006
Sold by:	OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	313
File size:	766 KB

About the Author

Mary Roach is the author of seven best-selling works of nonfiction, including Grunt, Stiff, and, most recently, Fuzz. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She lives in California.

Hometown:

San Francisco, California

Place of Birth:

New Hampshire

Education:

B.A., Wesleyan University, 1981

Website:

http://www.maryroach.net/

Editorial Reviews

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.

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

Janet Maslin

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

Kate Zernike