Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

Spook: Science Tackles the AfterlifeWhat happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's thatthe 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

What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's thatthe 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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 09/17/2005
ISBN: 9780393059625
Pages: 311
Weight: 1.04lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.34w x 1.10d
Award: Macavity Award - Nominee

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2005 pg. 835
Publishers Weekly 08/22/2005 pg. 54
Library Journal 09/01/2005 pg. 174
Ingram Advance 10/01/2005 pg. 43
Booklist 09/01/2005 pg. 23
Newsweek 10/10/2005 pg. 63
New York Times 10/09/2005 pg. 9
Entertainment Weekly 10/21/2005 pg. 79
People Weekly 10/31/2005 pg. 56
Library Journal Prepub Alert 06/01/2005 pg. 102
Discover 03/01/2006 pg. 70
Booksense '76 October 2005 10/01/2005 pg. 1
Entertainment Weekly 04/18/2008 pg. 68
Entertainment Weekly 03/22/2013 pg. 67