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Holistic Guidance - Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
![Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife]()
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List Price: $29.95
Our Price: $14.30
Your Save: $ 15.65 ( 52% )
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: Brilliance Audio Unabridged
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Audio Cassette
Dewey Decimal Number: 129
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Brilliance Audio Unabridged
Manufacturer: Brilliance Audio Unabridged
Number Of Items: 6
Publication Date: 2005-10-10
Publisher: Brilliance Audio Unabridged
Release Date: 2005-10-10
Studio: Brilliance Audio Unabridged
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Editorial Reviews:
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The best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now trains her considerable wit and curiosity on the human soul.
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 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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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not as good as Stiff, but still funny
Comment: I think Mary Roach is a hilarious writer. Ever since I read Stiff, I've been waiting in anticipation for her next book. In Spook Roach jumps from the physical to the metaphysical. Whereas Stiff examined the ultimate fate of cadavers, Spook looks to the soul. In particular, the book examines scientists' efforts to to offer measurable proof of the existence of the soul, and their attempts to understand what happens to immaterial parts of personhood after death. To give a full picture of these efforts Roach's research takes her across cultures and continents. She brings us the story of the woman who could vomit large quantities of fabric on demand in the name of talking to the dead. She writes of doctors who attached dying consumptives to giant scales. As with her other work, Spook is infused with Roach's sense of humor and her clear fascination with the bizarre. The stranger it gets, the happier Roach seems to be. This book is, without question, a rollicking good read. Beyond pure enjoyment, Roach book also shows just how enmeshed certain sectors of the scientific community have become, in the past two centuries, in matters of belief. The very premise of this book, and what unifies these stories, is an attempt to merge seemingly incompatible thought systems. Ever since the arguments in Kansas and the Dover, PA school board case, the ability, and the desirability of merging these two thought systems in the name of education has become an issue of political significance. Roach's study suggests that scientists and lay people have been involved in efforts to merge the physical and metaphysical arts. It shows that at significant points in the past, large numbers of people have been drawn to efforts to apply science to faith; see, for example, her chapter on spiritualism. The experts involved, however, (scientists, doctors, etc.) have ususally been marginal figures, on the fringes of their fields, or at least respected only in their work outside of the supernatural. Obviously, the scientific question of the afterlife is never going to create the firestorm generated by evolution/creationism/intelligent design. The general consensus remains that afterlife is a matter of faith, not science. Public schools have little need or desire to teach about the fate of the soul. That is the work of clerics and philosophers. But here lies the great irony. It is precisely because there is such widespread agreement in the western world on the division of body and soul, that attempts to bring science to bear of matters of the spirit and the immortal may be able to proceed without the criticism and argument generated by by similar battles in which the divisions seem less clear.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very Entertaining
Comment: I think that one of the best things you can say about a book is that it's entertaining and this one sure is. The author is very, very funny and makes learning about the various topics enjoyable. I'm going to have to get her other books as well.
Customer Rating:
Summary: the worst in pseudo-journalism
Comment: I would agree with several other reviewers who note that Mary Roach is clearly ignorant of her subject, if it were true that the subject of this book was contemporary para-scientific research. In fact the subject of this book is Mary Roach, whose attempt to be familiar and conversational becomes unbearably irritating in the first chapter when she jokes lamely about being too progressive to wear a sari kindly offered to her by the Dr she has asked to interview--and this amidst several pages of complaining about the traffic in India (what is this book about again?). I tried to skim to the bits where she was simply describing what she was told or what she saw by paranormal investigators, but it's tough to find a paragraph unencumbered by her offensively provincial commentary. A shame that such an interesting subject was swallowed up in the writer's self-involvement. Unreadable.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I expected more
Comment: I had high expectations for this book. But it ended up reminding me of Christine Wicker's "Lily Dale" book. And I didn't like that one. She seemed more prone to wanting to be witty and a non-believer than some one open to the paranormal. It was not what I expected from Roach at all.
Customer Rating:
Summary: FANTASTIC - and hysterical
Comment: Better than Stiff and I thought Stiff was great. Mary Roach is someone I'd like to have to dinner. What a great sense of topic and humor. I can't wait to read Bonk.
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