Description: “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.
BookieMonster says: This book is hilarious. And as more of an internal chuckler I truly mean laugh-out-loud, uncontrollable hilarity. It’s also really interesting, an exploration of various different current and historical ideas about the afterlife, the paranormal and the human (and animal) soul. Roach is an entertaining narrator, taking us from Indian villages to university laboratories to “medium school”, and also comes across as a charming person – her subjects certainly seem to take her questioning with good humour.
She also peppers her investigation with frequent and frequently hilarious small anecdotes and meandering asides – which is gold for “useless information” geeks like myself. This is more entertaining journalism than scientific investigation (or even popular science) and as such I find myself sometimes wanting a little more detail on occasion. But then I’m happily diverted by some historical story, some witty aside or some sceptic skewering of the need to believe (for example the chapter on ectoplasm being produced by spiritualists – why, Roach asks, did supposed scientific men not notice how ectoplasm looked exactly like pieces of gauze or cheesecloth?).
If nothing else, Roach excels at introducing a much-needed amount of levity into what is almost invariably a very po-faced world: “Earlier today, I heard someone say the words, “I felt at one with the divine source of creation.”… I had to fight the urge to push back my chair and start screaming: STAND BACK! ALL OF YOU! I’VE GOT AN ARTHUR FINDLAY BOX CUTTER! Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to.”
Another BookieMonster Highly Recommended Read. I’m hooked on Mary Roach – and will be reading her other books, Bonk and Stiff, as soon as I can.
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