Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife | 
 enlarge | Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $0.87
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Avg. Customer Rating:  113 reviews
Sales Rank: 79532
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.9 x 1.2
ISBN: 0393059626
Dewey Decimal Number: 129
EAN: 9780393059625
ASIN: 0393059626
Publication Date: October 10, 2005
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Condition: Mild warping; spine okay. stained Book is ACCEPTABLE with noted wear to cover and pages. Binding intact. May contain highlighting, inscriptions or notations. We offer a no-hassle guarantee on all our items. Orders generally ship by the next business day. Default Text
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Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 108 more reviews...
 Love it! January 2, 2009
Clever and very well written. Learned a lot of interesting information. I highly recommend the audiobook.
 Great Book! December 1, 2008
I loved this book! I bought it after I read one of her other books "Stiff". Brought up some very interesting points and wasn't religious at all. Didn't have quite as many entertaining anacedotes but still quite interesting- it was a good buy.
A Discussion of the Afterlife for the Humor Section (where else would it be?) November 24, 2008
This year for Halloween, I chose to read Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach. It was a funny book, very entertaining, and I would definitely seek out more by this author.
However, (as has been pointed out by other reviewers) science this is not. Ms. Roach did a lot of research on the hilarious work of a number of pseudo-scientists, both historic and recent. And the tales she tells -- e.g., investigating reincarnation in India, examining ectoplasm in Cambridge, trying to weigh a soul, going to medium college -- are fantastic. However, these are all stories of fringe wackos (or at least they should be regarded as fringe wackos).
If you are looking for a book that will give you a balanced and impartial exposition on the topic of life after death or a skeptical Houdini-esque deconstruction of various parapsychological claims, then Spook by Mary Roach will not satisfy you. But, if what you want is humorous reporting on the crazy things that people will believe happens during their long nap, then Spook is for you.
Not the definitave book on the subject but the most fun. October 31, 2008
The is the first of Mary's books that I read so I had no expectations. It is fun and funny and informative. Though not exhaustive, her research was pretty inclusive. The book has been called "anecdotal" but what else could you possibly call stories about this subject????? All they can possibly be is anecdotes. Questions aren't all answered but there are some pretty good explanations that themselves bring up more question.
If you don't expect this to be the definitive book with a definitive answer waiting in the pages but more informative with humor about the biggest question that we all have then you will enjoy it. Any book that can make one laugh about dying is good in my simple mind.
 Scary for all the wrong reasons October 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It wouldn't be truly fair to say that Mary Roach has the sense of humor, maturity level and research skills of a fourteen-year-old boy - fair to a fourteen-year-old boy that is. Because I assume many of them are forced by their teachers to look beyond Google searches for their information. And surely many of them don't see the necessity of finding toilet humor in every odd name or tangential topic they happen to uncover in that research. (Consider this gem on page 73, when discussing phrenology, she suddenly finds reason to diverge into one of the subject's inventions, a "portable hydrogen gas generator [which she proudly references Google for, no less], and goes on at length to describe the machine's use to detect flatulence...I mean...is this really relevant information? And I'm being gentle. This is actually a fairly mild example of her constant and unnecessary deviation into detailed discussions of bodily functions.) This is how Mary Roach and fourteen-year-old boys are best distinguished; I'd be less worried about the 14-year-old embarrassing me in public.
I can't rightfully rate a book lower than 3 stars if I actually *finished* it - which I did in this case. But it sure feels like a 2-star bomb thinking back on it. From such an intriguing title comes an awkward, displaced, meaningless and utterly irrelevant collection of chapters that are each just a quick editor's glance away from taking their rightful place as B-rate magazine articles. And, most poignantly, none contain the slightest bit of the actual intrigue so latent within the title. It's as though she wants to be a satirical writer rather than present any actual information on the alleged subject, and there isn't the slightest hint of a journalistic mind present in the writing. Here. Imagine David Sedaris had the "talent" part of his brain removed, and then tried to write a book on a random topic he had little or no previous knowledge of. Essentially, you would have "Spook."
What Roach has done is simply recounted the most obvious hoaxes in the history of supernatural studies, and in other cases she's dabbled in some variety of modern science attempting to discover actual paranormal activity, all the while admitting how little she actually knows about what the experts at hand are talking about. In one case she mentions asking a researcher to respond to her by "pretend[ing] you are talking to a seventh-grader,"(p.105). Is this the level of authorship and topical knowledge that we've come to accept as publishable material? Apparently so, judging by Roach's high sales.
Ultimately, this book is complete and utter fluff with not the slightest bit of substantial information that an average person with a laptop and internet connection could not find out for themselves in about an hour and a half on Wikipedia. The only sense of awe the reader of "science tackling the afterlife" is left with, is that an average college graduate with a B.A. in psychology convinced a publisher to fund a book on a topic that said author may as well have picked out of a hat of a hundred other subjects about which she admittedly knew next to nothing.
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