Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
by Mary Roach
List Price:
Our Price: $7.81
You Save: $22.14 (74%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $7.34 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Mary RoachReader: Bernadette Quigley
Edition: Audio Cassette
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2005-10-10
ISBN: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio Unabridged
Book Reviews of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
Book Review: Comedic tour guide
Summary: 3 Stars
An overview of work that has or is being done to examine the question "does consciousness survive death" mixed with mischief. Think of this instead as "Mary Roach - Your Unreliable Tour Guide - Tackles the Afterlife. She's the person with the mic on the red double decker tour bus who tells you in a diverting and entertaining way about the city you are visiting. The story told sounds good, but if you fact-checked you'd find some of what she says to be misleading. The last part and its sections on EMF/infrasound/ghosts were new topics for me and interesting. The book would have benefitted from an index.
Summary of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
The best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now 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. 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.
If author Mary Roach was a college professor, she'd have a zero drop-out rate. That's because when Roach tackles a subject--like the posthumous human body in her previous bestseller, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, or the soul in the winning Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife--she charges forth with such zeal, humor, and ingenuity that her students (er, readers) feel like they're witnessing the most interesting thing on Earth. Who the heck would skip that? As Roach informs us in her introduction, "This is a book for people who would like very much to believe in a soul and in an afterlife for it to hang around in, but who have trouble accepting these things on faith. It's a giggly, random, utterly earthbound assault on our most ponderous unanswered question." Talk about truth in advertising. With that, Roach grabs us by the wrist and hauls butt to India, England, and various points in between in search of human spiritual ephemera, consulting an earnest bunch of scientists, mystics, psychics, and kooks along the way. It's a heck of a journey and Roach, with one eyebrow mischievously cocked, is a fantastically entertaining tour guide, at once respectful and hilarious, dubious yet probing. And brother, does she bring the facts. Indeed, Spook's myriad footnotes are nearly as riveting as the principal text. To wit: "In reality, an X-ray of the head could not show the brain, because the skull blocks the rays. What appeared to be an X-ray of the folds and convolutions of a human brain inside a skull--an image circulated widely in 1896--was in fact an X-ray of artfully arranged cat intestines." Or this: "Medical treatises were eminently more readable in Sanctorius's day. Medicina statica delved fearlessly into subjects of unprecedented medical eccentricity: 'Cucumbers, how prejudicial,' and the tantalizing 'Leaping, its consequences.' There's even a full-page, near-infomercial-quality plug for something called the Flesh-Brush." While rigid students of theology might take exception to Roach's conclusions (namely, we're just a bag of bones killing time before donning a soil blanket) it's hard to imagine anyone not enjoying this impressively researched and immensely readable book. And since, as Roach suggests, each of us has only one go-round, we might as well waste downtime with something thoroughly fun. --Kim Hughes
General Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Engineering
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Medicine
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in General Books
My Sergei: A Love Storyby Ekaterina Gordeeva, E. M. Swift
Hachette Audio; Published: 1997-02-01; Audio Cassette; Book
Best price: $1.50
Price in other shops:
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine OfficerSimon & Schuster Audio; Published: 2005-10-03; Audio Cassette; Book
Best price: $2.78
Price in other shops:
Learning to Singby Clay Aiken, Allison Glock
Random House Audio; Published: 2004-11; Audio Cassette; Book
Best price: $1.94
Price in other shops:
Lucky Man: A MemoirSimon & Schuster Audio; Published: 2002-04-01; Audio Cassette; Book
Best price: $0.30
Price in other shops:
The Company She Keepsby Georgia Durante
Publishing Mills; Published: 2001-10-10; Audio Cassette; Book
Price in other shops:
For Laciby Sharon Rocha
Random House Audio; Published: 2005-12-27; Audio Cassette; Book
Price in other shops:
Trumanby David McCullough
Simon & Schuster Audio; Published: 1992-12-01; Audio Cassette; Book
Best price: $5.37
Price in other shops:
The Lost Boy: A Foster Child's Search for the Love of a Familyby Dave Pelzer
Orion (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd ); Published: 2001-09-06; Audio Cassette; Book
Best price: $22.62
Rocket Boys (The Coalwood Series #1)by Homer Hickam
Simon & Schuster Audio; Published: 1998-11-01; Audio Cassette; Book
Best price: $9.90
Price in other shops:
Seabiscuit: An American Legendby Laura Hillenbrand
Random House Audio; Published: 2001-03-06; Audio Cassette; Book
Best price: $1.75
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Deathby Deborah Blum
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 2007-05-29; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.22
Price in other shops:
My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Standsby Chelsea Handler
Bloomsbury USA; Published: 2005-06-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.59
Price in other shops:
Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Deathby Jessica Snyder Sachs
Basic Books; Published: 2002-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.51
Price in other shops:
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!by Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith
Quirk Books; Published: 2009-04-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.97
Price in other shops:
I Was Told There'd Be Cakeby Sloane Crosley
Riverhead Trade; Published: 2008-04-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.24
Price in other shops:
Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examinerby Michael M. Baden
Ballantine Books; Published: 1990-03-28; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.04
Price in other shops:
The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them)by Peter Sagal
Harper Paperbacks; Published: 2008-10-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.62
Price in other shops:
When You Are Engulfed in Flamesby David Sedaris
Little, Brown and Company; Published: 2008-06-03; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $8.79
Price in other shops:
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadaversby Mary Roach
W.W. Norton & Co.; Published: 2004-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.00
Price in other shops:
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sexby Mary Roach
W.W. Norton & Co.; Published: 2009-04-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.53
Price in other shops: