Spook, the new book on the afterlife by Mary Roach is due out this month. Roach is most known for her earlier book Stiff, a witty layman’s approach to what happens to our bodies when we die: burial rites, brain banks, medical cadavers, interviews with forensic entomologists, the whole deal. The book even made a short appearance on Six Feet Under.
Spook continues the funny, informative approach in her desire to find out what the afterlife is like, starting with whether there’s a place to plug in her laptop. Along the way she covers ghosts, soul-weighing, and ectoplasm, and makes short detours into quantum mechanics, information theory, and one man’s search for the moment that a soul enters a human embryo.
Both books have the same winning balance of humor and information, and I recommend them strongly.
Secretly Ironic 