Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach Paperback Book

Details

Rent Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

Author: Mary Roach

Format: Paperback, Unabridged-CD, Unabridged-MP3

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: Oct 2006

Genre: Science - General

Retail Price: $16.95

Pages: 311

Synopsis

'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.

View descriptions at Amazon.com

Reviews