Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

Unabridged
Author: Mary Roach
Narrator: Bernadette Quigley
Genres: Religion & Spirituality, Health, Body & Mind, New Age
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Date: October 2005
Length: 8 hours
Ratings:
Formats:
  • CD

Overview

"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.

Reviews (1)

Spook! Science Tackles the Afterlife

Written by David Gardner on February 7th, 2006

  • Book Rating: 2/5

This one sort of left me scratching my head. Sometimes the author got so mired in the details of scientific theories, experiments and research that I found myself falling into a confused slumber. I came close to sending the book back before finishing it. I'm glad I stuck with it because the last couple of chapters were more interesting. All in all, there's not a lot new or fascinating stuff revealed here. If you've read literature on the afterlife before, you've probably run across much of this information. Try reading Mary Roach's previous book "Stiff: The Secret Life of Corpses." It was much better.