Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, Hardcover

Awards🏆
Nominee (2006) - Macavity Award - (Nonfiction)

Contributor(s):

• Author: Mary Roach

What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's thatthe 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.
 
Review citations

• Kirkus Reviews - pg. 835 - 08/01/2005
• Publishers Weekly / Best Of The Best/Highly Recommended - pg. 54 - 08/22/2005
• Publishers Weekly / Exceptional Presentation - pg. 54 - 08/22/2005
• Publishers Weekly / Book Of Special Distinction - pg. 54 - 08/22/2005
• Publishers Weekly / Top 15 Book Of The Year - pg. 54 - 08/22/2005
• Publishers Weekly / Highly Recommended - pg. 54 - 08/22/2005
• Library Journal - pg. 174 - 09/01/2005
• Ingram Advance - pg. 43 - 10/01/2005
• Booklist - pg. 23 - 09/01/2005
• Newsweek - pg. 63 - 10/10/2005
• New York Times - pg. 9 - 10/09/2005
• Entertainment Weekly - pg. 79 - 10/21/2005
• People Weekly - pg. 56 - 10/31/2005
• Library Journal Prepub Alert - pg. 102 - 06/01/2005
• Discover - pg. 70 - 03/01/2006
• Booksense '76 October 2005 - pg. 1 - 10/01/2005
• Entertainment Weekly - pg. 68 - 04/18/2008
• Entertainment Weekly - pg. 67 - 03/22/2013