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| Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife | 
 enlarge | Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95 (32.84 RON)
Buy New: $11.16 (26.27 RON)
You Save: $2.79 (6.57 RON) (20%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  104 reviews
Sales Rank: 15341
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0393329127
Dewey Decimal Number: 129
EAN: 9780393329124
ASIN: 0393329127
Publication Date: October 2, 2006
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 I expected more August 23, 2008
I had high expectations for this book. But it ended up reminding me of Christine Wicker's "Lily Dale" book. And I didn't like that one. She seemed more prone to wanting to be witty and a non-believer than some one open to the paranormal. It was not what I expected from Roach at all.
 FANTASTIC - and hysterical August 19, 2008
Better than Stiff and I thought Stiff was great. Mary Roach is someone I'd like to have to dinner. What a great sense of topic and humor. I can't wait to read Bonk.
awsome book August 17, 2008
Mary Roach is an excellent author of three books. This book is a great examination of the "unknown" component of the afterlife. The scientific slant is very weighty, but Roach adds a great deal of humor and her own take of her beliefs.
 Life after Stiff August 16, 2008
Interesting topic, and the logical follow-up to her previous book, Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. But I thought the title "Spook" was rather misleading; perhaps "Soul" or "Spirit" would have been more apt. And that misnomer lead to my greatest frustration with the book, I thought it would be more about ghosts, hauntings, that side of the afterlife. Roach's quips are out in-force in this book, more than the gently humor she shows in STiff, and the book is actually less enjoyable as a result. Her humor is always biting, but seldom appropriate and often distracting. Still, the majority of the book, about 70%, was highly entertaining and educational.
 Superficial yet wildly entertaining August 11, 2008
First, let me state for the record that I would follow Mary Roach to the ends of the earth and back. Her sharp writing, wicked sense of humor, and insatiable thirst for knowledge are intoxicating. Second, allow me to be perfectly clear: I am not a scientist, merely an overly inquisitive yet skeptical student with a lot of time on her hands, so if anything that follows in my review is incorrect, you can blame my professors. =) The broad and diverse field of parapsychology is a tricky subject to cover in less than 300 pages, even when narrowed to a particularly subject, such as life after death. It is especially difficult because the field is one that Western science in general trivializes and, more often than not, dismisses altogether. "Spook" is not as good as Mary Roach's "Stiff" and "Bonk" for that very reason. The last remaining research laboratory at an accredited university in the United States that studied paranormal phenomena (at Princeton, no less) was shut down in 2007, and other outlets for interested researchers are limited at best. However, Western science's attempts to discover the existence of an afterlife are rooted in a deeply flawed mindset, the one that all cultures have the same concept of a soul in the first place. In fact, Judeo-Christian theology is in the minority. Most cultures throughout the world participate in animistic ritual-based religions or, in many instances, a combination of an institutionalized religion and the beliefs of their anscentors, and the majority of these cultures believe in multiple souls and seemingly taboo (to us, at least) forms of worshiping them. Science will never be able to explain all that occurs in this world and, if there is one, the next, but as long as Western science closes its doors to the beliefs of other cultures, we will never learn how to reconcile and embrace the human desire to find, as the late Joseph Campbell once said, "...the experience of being alive." While it is by no means a fully fleshed-out attempt to research the paranormal, this book is still an entertaining and hilarious look at mankind's search for the answer to one of our most haunting (pun unintended) questions.
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