It also helps that Roach's curiosity is boundless (evident in the abundant tangential footnotes) and she's willing to declare, even to the experts she's talking to, that she knows absolutely nothing about either this afterlife business or that science stuff. Rawat travels around India investigating cases of reincarnation, while Gary Schwartz, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona, performs lab experiments with mediums.Īs with "Stiff," Roach brings to "Spook" a lightness and a sense of humor that, happily, smooth the morbid edges of the proceedings she describes: Before zooming in on Schwartz, she takes us on a hilarious romp through the history of mediumship and ectoplasm - the white stuff that emanated from a medium during a séance, often from her vagina, and that, disgustingly enough, was almost certainly rolled-up cheesecloth or bits of sheep lung. In 1901, he weighed consumptives on a giant scale, hoping to prove that they'd become lighter at the moment of death and that, therefore, the soul existed and had weight (that's right: he concluded it to be 21 grams). Take, for example, Duncan Macdougall, a respected surgeon in turn-of-the-century Massachusetts. Instead, Roach relies on a string of men in lab coats - the lucky ones armed with high-tech scales and sensors and sound equipment, the not-so-fortunate at least possessing a relentless set of questions and an unshakable conviction that the scientific method can suss out the truth on anything, even that which normally belongs to the realm of religion and mysticism.
There are no Ouija boards here (well, maybe a couple). "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife" is Roach's answer to that question, or rather it's her exhibit of the various conclusions reached by scientists trying to determine whether part of us lives after our bodies give out. While "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" was climbing the bestseller lists (and even made a cameo on "Six Feet Under"), Roach started to wonder about what happened after death to that other part of us: the intangible, undonatable part - the consciousness, or the soul. That column, as well as one on a human crash-test dummy, inspired her first book, which looked at the odd ways science puts your donated remains to use (like seeing how much food it takes to burst a stomach). When she was a columnist for Salon, the advent of Thanksgiving led her to investigate how much a human stomach could hold before it burst.
To be polite about it, Mary Roach has a rather eccentric sense of curiosity.
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