Occult Book Store
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
RRP: $13.95
Our Price: $11.16
You Save: $ 2.79 ( 20% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price: $11.16
You Save: $ 2.79 ( 20% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Average Customer Rating:
Experimental feature: Order Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife from the UK, Canada, Germany or France by clicking an appropriate flag below.
Some items available at Amazon.com are not available in all countries.
Some items available at Amazon.com are not available in all countries.
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 129
EAN: 9780393329124
ISBN: 0393329127
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2006-10-02
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Studio: W. W. Norton
Dewey Decimal Number: 129
EAN: 9780393329124
ISBN: 0393329127
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2006-10-02
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Studio: W. W. Norton
Editorial Review of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
"Equal parts Groucho Marx and Stephen Jay Gould, both enlightening and entertaining."—Sunday Denver Post & Rocky Mountain News
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. 10 illustrations.
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. 10 illustrations.
Customer Reviews of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not the definitave book on the subject but the most fun.
Review: The is the first of Mary's books that I read so I had no expectations. It is fun and funny and informative. Though not exhaustive, her research was pretty inclusive. The book has been called "anecdotal" but what else could you possibly call stories about this subject????? All they can possibly be is anecdotes. Questions aren't all answered but there are some pretty good explanations that themselves bring up more question.
If you don't expect this to be the definitive book with a definitive answer waiting in the pages but more informative with humor about the biggest question that we all have then you will enjoy it. Any book that can make one laugh about dying is good in my simple mind.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Scary for all the wrong reasons
Review: It wouldn't be truly fair to say that Mary Roach has the sense of humor, maturity level and research skills of a fourteen-year-old boy - fair to a fourteen-year-old boy that is. Because I assume many of them are forced by their teachers to look beyond Google searches for their information. And surely many of them don't see the necessity of finding toilet humor in every odd name or tangential topic they happen to uncover in that research. (Consider this gem on page 73, when discussing phrenology, she suddenly finds reason to diverge into one of the subject's inventions, a "portable hydrogen gas generator [which she proudly references Google for, no less], and goes on at length to describe the machine's use to detect flatulence...I mean...is this really relevant information? And I'm being gentle. This is actually a fairly mild example of her constant and unnecessary deviation into detailed discussions of bodily functions.) This is how Mary Roach and fourteen-year-old boys are best distinguished; I'd be less worried about the 14-year-old embarrassing me in public.
I can't rightfully rate a book lower than 3 stars if I actually *finished* it - which I did in this case. But it sure feels like a 2-star bomb thinking back on it. From such an intriguing title comes an awkward, displaced, meaningless and utterly irrelevant collection of chapters that are each just a quick editor's glance away from taking their rightful place as B-rate magazine articles. And, most poignantly, none contain the slightest bit of the actual intrigue so latent within the title. It's as though she wants to be a satirical writer rather than present any actual information on the alleged subject, and there isn't the slightest hint of a journalistic mind present in the writing. Here. Imagine David Sedaris had the "talent" part of his brain removed, and then tried to write a book on a random topic he had little or no previous knowledge of. Essentially, you would have "Spook."
What Roach has done is simply recounted the most obvious hoaxes in the history of supernatural studies, and in other cases she's dabbled in some variety of modern science attempting to discover actual paranormal activity, all the while admitting how little she actually knows about what the experts at hand are talking about. In one case she mentions asking a researcher to respond to her by "pretend[ing] you are talking to a seventh-grader,"(p.105). Is this the level of authorship and topical knowledge that we've come to accept as publishable material? Apparently so, judging by Roach's high sales.
Ultimately, this book is complete and utter fluff with not the slightest bit of substantial information that an average person with a laptop and internet connection could not find out for themselves in about an hour and a half on Wikipedia. The only sense of awe the reader of "science tackling the afterlife" is left with, is that an average college graduate with a B.A. in psychology convinced a publisher to fund a book on a topic that said author may as well have picked out of a hat of a hundred other subjects about which she admittedly knew next to nothing.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: don't waste your money on this book
Review: what a waste of time reading this book...poorly researched, and certainly not even close to a serious look at the 'afterlife'....the author attempts to use humor to get her points across, with little success....what a disappointing book!!
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not as good as Stiff, but still funny
Review: 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:
Review Summary: Very Entertaining
Review: 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.
Review Summary: Not the definitave book on the subject but the most fun.
Review: The is the first of Mary's books that I read so I had no expectations. It is fun and funny and informative. Though not exhaustive, her research was pretty inclusive. The book has been called "anecdotal" but what else could you possibly call stories about this subject????? All they can possibly be is anecdotes. Questions aren't all answered but there are some pretty good explanations that themselves bring up more question.
If you don't expect this to be the definitive book with a definitive answer waiting in the pages but more informative with humor about the biggest question that we all have then you will enjoy it. Any book that can make one laugh about dying is good in my simple mind.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Scary for all the wrong reasons
Review: It wouldn't be truly fair to say that Mary Roach has the sense of humor, maturity level and research skills of a fourteen-year-old boy - fair to a fourteen-year-old boy that is. Because I assume many of them are forced by their teachers to look beyond Google searches for their information. And surely many of them don't see the necessity of finding toilet humor in every odd name or tangential topic they happen to uncover in that research. (Consider this gem on page 73, when discussing phrenology, she suddenly finds reason to diverge into one of the subject's inventions, a "portable hydrogen gas generator [which she proudly references Google for, no less], and goes on at length to describe the machine's use to detect flatulence...I mean...is this really relevant information? And I'm being gentle. This is actually a fairly mild example of her constant and unnecessary deviation into detailed discussions of bodily functions.) This is how Mary Roach and fourteen-year-old boys are best distinguished; I'd be less worried about the 14-year-old embarrassing me in public.
I can't rightfully rate a book lower than 3 stars if I actually *finished* it - which I did in this case. But it sure feels like a 2-star bomb thinking back on it. From such an intriguing title comes an awkward, displaced, meaningless and utterly irrelevant collection of chapters that are each just a quick editor's glance away from taking their rightful place as B-rate magazine articles. And, most poignantly, none contain the slightest bit of the actual intrigue so latent within the title. It's as though she wants to be a satirical writer rather than present any actual information on the alleged subject, and there isn't the slightest hint of a journalistic mind present in the writing. Here. Imagine David Sedaris had the "talent" part of his brain removed, and then tried to write a book on a random topic he had little or no previous knowledge of. Essentially, you would have "Spook."
What Roach has done is simply recounted the most obvious hoaxes in the history of supernatural studies, and in other cases she's dabbled in some variety of modern science attempting to discover actual paranormal activity, all the while admitting how little she actually knows about what the experts at hand are talking about. In one case she mentions asking a researcher to respond to her by "pretend[ing] you are talking to a seventh-grader,"(p.105). Is this the level of authorship and topical knowledge that we've come to accept as publishable material? Apparently so, judging by Roach's high sales.
Ultimately, this book is complete and utter fluff with not the slightest bit of substantial information that an average person with a laptop and internet connection could not find out for themselves in about an hour and a half on Wikipedia. The only sense of awe the reader of "science tackling the afterlife" is left with, is that an average college graduate with a B.A. in psychology convinced a publisher to fund a book on a topic that said author may as well have picked out of a hat of a hundred other subjects about which she admittedly knew next to nothing.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: don't waste your money on this book
Review: what a waste of time reading this book...poorly researched, and certainly not even close to a serious look at the 'afterlife'....the author attempts to use humor to get her points across, with little success....what a disappointing book!!
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not as good as Stiff, but still funny
Review: 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:
Review Summary: Very Entertaining
Review: 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.