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Title: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
ISBN: 0393059626
Author:
Mary Roach
Publicate Date: 2005-10-10
Publish: 2005-10-10
List Price: $24.95
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $3.40
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $0.87
Amazon Merchant Price: $18.21
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Love it!
Clever and very well written. Learned a lot of interesting information. I highly recommend the audiobook.
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2: Great Book!
I loved this book! I bought it after I read one of her other books "Stiff". Brought up some very interesting points and wasn't religious at all. Didn't have quite as many entertaining anacedotes but still quite interesting- it was a good buy.
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3: A Discussion of the Afterlife for the Humor Section (where else would it be?)
This year for Halloween, I chose to read Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach. It was a funny book, very entertaining, and I would definitely seek out more by this author.
However, (as has been pointed out by other reviewers) science this is not. Ms. Roach did a lot of research on the hilarious work of a number of pseudo-scientists, both historic and recent. And the tales she tells -- e.g., investigating reincarnation in India, examining ectoplasm in Cambridge, trying to weigh a soul, going to medium college -- are fantastic. However, these are all stories of fringe wackos (or at least they should be regarded as fringe wackos).
If you are looking for a book that will give you a balanced and impartial exposition on the topic of life after death or a skeptical Houdini-esque deconstruction of various parapsychological claims, then Spook by Mary Roach will not satisfy you. But, if what you want is humorous reporting on the crazy things that people will believe happens during their long nap, then Spook is for you.
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4: Not the definitave book on the subject but the most fun.
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.
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5: Scary for all the wrong reasons
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.
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