We’re still doing that this semester (come to our first discussion on Friday, 2/13), but we’re also adding an online component. I would definitely read more of her books.Welcome to the first online discussion for Spook! Last semester we met in the Queensbury Writing Center on Friday mornings from 11 to 12 to discuss the week’s chapter and see what people in the campus community thought about the reading. Highlights include a trip to meet a North Carolina family whose great-grandfather returned from the grave to make changes to his will, descriptions of the various contraptions invented to weigh the human (or animal) soul, scientists investigating the possibility that electro-magnetic fields and infrasound might cause feelings of being haunted, and descriptions of mediums from the spiritualism movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries with their methods of producing "ectoplasm" from a variety of bodily orifices. But Mary Roach knows how to keep her writing interesting and moving at an energetic pace despite the mundane results produced by those searching for proof that people outlast their corporal bodies.
Which is exactly what the experiments produced. I decided to read it because it seemed like a natural sequel to the excellent "Stiff." I feared that since the most likely results of the research in the book would be entirely negative or at best offering some narrow wiggle-room for their most optimistic interpretors. I enjoyed this book far more than I expected to. 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.
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. 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. In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. "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?"
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