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Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
by Mary Roach
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Hardcover:
288
pages; Dimensions (in inches): 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.1 |
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Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company (October 2005) |
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ISBN:
0393059626 |
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book
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 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, the author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, 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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editorial
reviews
New York Times Book Review --October 9, 2005
"For all Roach's skeptical and often hilarious accounts, she is an eager volunteer and ready to accept evidence if evidence there be....Truly deft handling of the (mostly) daft."
New York Times--October 6, 2005
"Dependably witty, especially when it ventures far into the ether....Populated by vividly evoked oddballs....SPOOK has great appeal on the basis of Ms. Roach's droll research....Ms. Roach makes herself a wry, enjoyable character throughout the book's escapades....In SPOOK, she makes a clever investigator and a thoroughly entertaining, if skeptical, tour guide."
Publishers Weekly--August 22, 2005
"A smart, quirky, hilarious look at whether there is a soul that survives our physical demise. Roach perfectly balances her skepticism and her boundless curiosity with a sincere desire to know....She is an original who can enliven any subject with wit, keen reporting and a sly intelligence." (starred review)
Kirkus--August 1, 2005
"For all Roach's skeptical and often hilarious accounts, she is an eager volunteer and ready to accept evidence if evidence there be....Truly deft handling of the (mostly) daft." |
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