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Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
Mary Roach
The best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now trains her considerable wit and curiosity on the human soul.
W. W. Norton
October 2005
288 pages
ISBN: 0393059626
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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