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A review by sklus
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
4.0
Just a warning, if you're uncomfortable with death, this isn't the book or the review for you.
Spook isn't full of concrete answers. If you want a yes or no on the whole question of ghosts' existence, then this isn't the book for you. But it is the book for you if you want full of quirky anecdotes and fun (and not so fun) science, then I would recommend it. Spook gets a lower rating from me than Stiff because the latter has definitive answers; we know what happens to the human body after death, but not the soul. The writing in Spook was just as entertaining and amusing as in Stiff. I got the same amount of second-hand embarrassment from the pointed, but valid questions Mary Roach posed to random members of the scientific community in both books. So the long and short of it is that I recommend this book, but not if you're not comfortable with death and not if you expect definitive answers.
Spook isn't full of concrete answers. If you want a yes or no on the whole question of ghosts' existence, then this isn't the book for you. But it is the book for you if you want full of quirky anecdotes and fun (and not so fun) science, then I would recommend it. Spook gets a lower rating from me than Stiff because the latter has definitive answers; we know what happens to the human body after death, but not the soul. The writing in Spook was just as entertaining and amusing as in Stiff. I got the same amount of second-hand embarrassment from the pointed, but valid questions Mary Roach posed to random members of the scientific community in both books. So the long and short of it is that I recommend this book, but not if you're not comfortable with death and not if you expect definitive answers.