num_pages: 295
description: "Equal parts Groucho Marx &amp; Stephen Jay Gould, both enlightening &amp; entertaining."—Sunday Denver Post &amp; Rocky Mountain News The best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now trains her considerable wit &amp; curiosity on the human soul. What happens when we die? Does the light just go out &amp; 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 brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary &amp; 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 &amp; 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 &amp; visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged thru cadavers &amp; calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts &amp; the last surviving sample of ectoplasm in a Cambridge University archive.
language: English
title: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
titlecomplete: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
genres: Audiobook, Humor, Religion, Death, Science, Ghosts, Psychology, Nonfiction, History, Paranormal
ratings_count: 38439
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Macavity Award
category: Best Nonfiction
publisher: W.W. Norton