

Loading... Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlifeby Mary Roach
![]() No current Talk conversations about this book. A little flippant - just really silly. ( ![]() this book was interesting, in a pop science way, but ultimately not interesting enough to finish. Roach employs an obnoxiously condescending tone throughout most of the book (as if her private title is Dumbasses: People Who Believe in Life After Death), but the subject matter and considerable research is very interesting. If you would like to start reading her work, I would suggest Stiff or Bonk over Spook. Just couldn't get through this - way too talky, way too twee and clever. Narrator did way too many cute voices and accents. Not enough cool information. Stopped listening after the 4th disc. This one didn't grab me the way her other books have, though certainly I've found myself retaining a lot of the info in here. I think that perhaps it's just the nature of the topic-- there's so much quackery and superstition and non-science that it felt a little....soft at times.
Roach ranges far and wide in "Spook," traveling to India to look into reincarnation and England to take a course in how to be a medium. She is a skeptic, but comes to some surprising conclusions in "Spook."
"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 laptop?" 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" -- publisher's web site. No library descriptions found. |
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