Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
by Mary Roach
Spirited And Otherworldly
If author Mary Roach was a college professor, shed have a zero drop-out
rate. Thats because when Roach tackles a subject--like the posthumous
human body in her previous bestseller, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human
Cadavers, or the soul in the winning Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife--
she charges forth with such zeal, humor, and ingenuity that her students
(er, readers) feel like theyre witnessing the most interesting thing on Earth.
Who the heck would skip that? As Roach informs us in her introduction,
This is a book for people who would like very much to believe in a soul and
in an afterlife for it to hang around in, but who have trouble accepting these
things on faith. Its a giggly, random, utterly earthbound assault on our most
ponderous unanswered question. Talk about truth in advertising. With that,
Roach grabs us by the wrist and hauls butt to India, England, and various
points in between in search of human spiritual ephemera, consulting an
earnest bunch of scientists, mystics, psychics, and kooks along the way.
Its a heck of a journey and Roach, with one eyebrow mischievously

cocked, is a fantastically entertaining tour guide, at once respectful and
hilarious, dubious yet probing. And brother, does she bring the facts.
Indeed, Spooks myriad footnotes are nearly as riveting as the principal
text. To wit: In reality, an X-ray of the head could not show the brain,
because the skull blocks the rays. What appeared to be an X-ray of the
folds and convolutions of a human brain inside a skull--an image circulated
widely in 1896--was in fact an X-ray of artfully arranged cat intestines. Or
this: Medical treatises were eminently more readable in Sanctoriuss day.
Medicina statica delved fearlessly into subjects of unprecedented medical
eccentricity: Cucumbers, how prejudicial, and the tantalizing Leaping, its
consequences. Theres even a full-page, near-infomercial-quality plug for
something called the Flesh-Brush. While rigid students of theology might
take exception to Roachs conclusions (namely, were just a bag of bones
killing time before donning a soil blanket) its hard to imagine anyone not
enjoying this impressively researched and immensely readable book. And
since, as Roach suggests, each of us has only one go-round, we might as
well waste downtime with something thoroughly fun. --Kim Hughes
Personal Review: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary
Roach
In "Spook," Mary Roach is at her witty best in discussing ways that
scientists have tackled reincarnation, spirit mediums and the search for the
location and weight of the soul. Roach combines a wicked wit and a
skeptical, scientific attitude that is entertaining and informative. The worst
thing I can say about the book is that her fascinating subject matter
encourages the reader to devour the pages, while her witty asides and
commentary require that the reader slow down. It's a little like eating ice
cream ON a hot day -- you want to gobble down the treat, but have to slow
down to avoid the brain freeze.
Roach takes us to India to visit a scientist who "investigates" reports that
the recently dead have reincarnated into newborns from neighboring
villages. The scientist, who claims to be impartial and impervious to bias,
clearly could use a bit more skepticism and rigor. Roach takes the
opportunity to discus how a culture (like India's) that takes reincarnation for
granted is more likely to read their beliefs into the random expression of
four-year-olds that would we in the West. Of course, we tend to see the
divine visage in flapjacks, so who is to judge?
Roach does a nice job of investigating NDEs (near death experiences) and
discussing the truth about these strange phenomena. Are NDEs real? Are
they imagined? Whatever could they mean? Ever the skeptic, Roach takes
them with a grain of salt while holding out a slim hope that they turn out to
be real. A laptop computer, laid on a high shelf in a hospital emergency
room and generating random images for the next soul-traveler, should
eventually provide an answer.
Roach's chapters on the mediums of the late 18th and early nineteenth
centuries were especially interesting to me. Rarely do you get to see a

competent skeptic take on the outlandish manifestations -- trumpets,
moving tables, taps and blasts of wind -- that were part and parcel of
séances during the period. Roach takes on the bizarre phenomenon of
ectoplasm -- a material supposedly produced by mediums from contacts
with the other world. Credulous scientists were fooled by the appearance
of this matter, and could not explain it. Other scientists showed
conclusively that the material was simple cloth or animal tissue that had
been secreted by the mediums on their persons. Roach's description of a
trip to Oxford to examine purported ectoplasm led her to determine (by
smell) in which bodily orifice the medium secreted the material. Ewww!
Lest we think that all scientific lunacy about death occurred decades ago,
Roach tells about scientists who attempt to calculate, using Einstein's
equation equating matter and energy, the energy lost when a soul leaves a
human body at death. Ever the materialists, these worthies seems immune
to the possibility that the soul could be non-corporeal.
Roach, in "Spook," is funny, irreverent and informative. A great read, one
bite at a time.
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