Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Norton
Category: EBooks
List Price: $9.95
Buy New: $7.96
You Save: $1.99 (20%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  103 reviews
Sales Rank: 1849
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Dewey Decimal Number: 129
ASIN: B001CBMX92
Publication Date: October 10, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
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
-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 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 soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 98 more reviews...
 FANTASTIC - and hysterical August 19, 2008
Better than Stiff and I thought Stiff was great. Mary Roach is someone I'd like to have to dinner. What a great sense of topic and humor. I can't wait to read Bonk.
awsome book August 17, 2008
Mary Roach is an excellent author of three books. This book is a great examination of the "unknown" component of the afterlife. The scientific slant is very weighty, but Roach adds a great deal of humor and her own take of her beliefs.
 Life after Stiff August 16, 2008
Interesting topic, and the logical follow-up to her previous book, Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. But I thought the title "Spook" was rather misleading; perhaps "Soul" or "Spirit" would have been more apt. And that misnomer lead to my greatest frustration with the book, I thought it would be more about ghosts, hauntings, that side of the afterlife. Roach's quips are out in-force in this book, more than the gently humor she shows in STiff, and the book is actually less enjoyable as a result. Her humor is always biting, but seldom appropriate and often distracting. Still, the majority of the book, about 70%, was highly entertaining and educational.
 Superficial yet wildly entertaining August 11, 2008
First, let me state for the record that I would follow Mary Roach to the ends of the earth and back. Her sharp writing, wicked sense of humor, and insatiable thirst for knowledge are intoxicating. Second, allow me to be perfectly clear: I am not a scientist, merely an overly inquisitive yet skeptical student with a lot of time on her hands, so if anything that follows in my review is incorrect, you can blame my professors. =) The broad and diverse field of parapsychology is a tricky subject to cover in less than 300 pages, even when narrowed to a particularly subject, such as life after death. It is especially difficult because the field is one that Western science in general trivializes and, more often than not, dismisses altogether. "Spook" is not as good as Mary Roach's "Stiff" and "Bonk" for that very reason. The last remaining research laboratory at an accredited university in the United States that studied paranormal phenomena (at Princeton, no less) was shut down in 2007, and other outlets for interested researchers are limited at best. However, Western science's attempts to discover the existence of an afterlife are rooted in a deeply flawed mindset, the one that all cultures have the same concept of a soul in the first place. In fact, Judeo-Christian theology is in the minority. Most cultures throughout the world participate in animistic ritual-based religions or, in many instances, a combination of an institutionalized religion and the beliefs of their anscentors, and the majority of these cultures believe in multiple souls and seemingly taboo (to us, at least) forms of worshiping them. Science will never be able to explain all that occurs in this world and, if there is one, the next, but as long as Western science closes its doors to the beliefs of other cultures, we will never learn how to reconcile and embrace the human desire to find, as the late Joseph Campbell once said, "...the experience of being alive." While it is by no means a fully fleshed-out attempt to research the paranormal, this book is still an entertaining and hilarious look at mankind's search for the answer to one of our most haunting (pun unintended) questions.
good followup to Stiff July 27, 2008
Mary Roach has followed up her 2005 book, Stiff, with Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, which is even more clearly a book of interest for skeptics. With the same sense of humor, frequent use of interesting asides and footnotes, and a strong skepticism, she looks at attempts to apply science to the question of life after death. Spook covers experiments designed to locate a soul and find out what happens when you die. She looks at studies of reincarnation by Ian Stevenson and Kirti Rawat, the attempts to weigh the body at the time of death and see if it loses weight by Duncan Macdougall, attempts to X-ray the soul by Arthur Goodspeed. She went to Cambridge University and looked at their sample of Helena Duncan's vaginally-extruded ectoplasm from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, which she describes as a ten foot by three foot piece of cotton fabric. She talks to Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona about his tests with Allison DuBois, who inspired the TV series "Medium," and points out the criticisms of them by Univ. of Oregon psychologist and Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Ray Hyman. She visits spiritualists, looks at Electronic Voice Phenomena or EVP, and tries out the "God Helmet" of Laurentian University psychologist Michael Persinger, and correctly expresses more skepticism about his work than some skeptics have. She looks at a couple of cases of claimed ghosts, at Warwick Castle in England, and the ghost of James Chaffin in North Carolina. And she looks at studies of near-death experiences. In the end, she is open-mindedly skeptical--she ends by saying "the debunkers are probably right," but chooses to believe in ghosts anyway because it's more fun.
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