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Also by Mary Roach:

Fuzz, September 2021
Hardcover / e-Book
Gulp, April 2013
Hardcover / e-Book
The Ultimate Guide To Fellatio, September 2010
Trade Size
Packing For Mars, August 2010
Hardcover
Bonk, April 2009
Hardcover
Bonk, April 2008
Hardcover
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, October 2005
Hardcover
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, May 2004
Trade Size (reprint)

SPOOK: SCIENCE TACKLES THE AFTERLIFE
By: 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.

Media Buzz

Talk of the Nation - October 27, 2006
Sunday Morning - October 30, 2005