Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (Unabridged)
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3.3 • 23 Ratings
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher 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 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.
Customer Reviews
"Spook"
I like Mary Roachs’ writing for her humor and her scholarship. She chose a difficult subject with this book because our hopes and fantasies about the question of life after death clash with the reality of paranormal research - which is mostly dull, sometimes really stupid and always, so far, a dry hole. Hence, the book is almost sure to disappoint everyone in some way. This is no lurid, or maudlin ghost hunting show. There’s no good ghost stories. Roach is a science writer and her goal is to review the history of efforts to prove the existence of the human soul and to inform us about current research. It’s tough going. I estimate that at least a quarter of the book is tangental material - that, and Roachs’ humor is what makes it worthwhile. I found it amusing and informative. And after the chapter on Ectoplasm, I fervently HOPE that many people not only DON’T come back, but are permanently gone from everywhere.
I recommend it with the caution that the actual meat of the book is not a thrill, but if you want a pretty good, brief history of actual scientific ghost-questing, this may be for you.
As to the reader, who others have complained about - she IS awfully perky, but I got used to her and I actually think Roach herself would read like that. Ultimately the only problem I had with the reader was her tendency to strongly caricature the voices of the real people quoted in the book - a practice more suited to fiction than non-fiction.
Not a good narration.
I can't take all the voices and the style in which this is read.
You're not at an audition for the high school play.
I like this book, but this woman's narraration is terrible. I loved the audiobook "Stiff", and I think one of the things I loved most about it was Mary Roach's voice speaking her own work. This needs to be remade w/ Mary Roach reading it. This woman speaks like a bad actor.