I'm dancing a giddy little jig of excitement over the news that Mary Roach (Stiff) has a new book coming out. Having done dead, Roach moves on to the logical next step with Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (W.W. Norton). Here's what the publisher has to say:
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 laptop?" In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soulsearchers: 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.
The book has a scheduled October release date (well of course it does--we see the Halloween tie-ins coming), so plan to start haunting your local bookseller then. In the meantime, if you haven't already read Stiff, you should. Now.
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