Spook (edit title)

Timothy Gray approved Ulrich’s request to change the title of Spook Tuesday, November 3 2009.

Ulrich changed the title of Spook Tuesday, November 3 2009.

Scott K edited the quotations of Spook Wednesday, August 19 2009.

• Added a quotation: “"You can say it to yourself, Mary. They read your thoughts." "They do?" Dave nods his head. "Sure they do." Well, no wonder they're ignoring me.”

Shelfari edited the description of Spook Friday, July 31 2009.

• "Equal parts Groucho Marx and Stephen Jay Gould, both enlightening and entertaining."— Sunday Denver Post & Rocky Mountain News The best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now trains her considerable wit and curiosity on the human soul. 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 lap-top?" 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. 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. 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. 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.

Shelfari edited the contributors of Spook Wednesday, July 22 2009.

• Added a contributor: Mary Roach: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of Spook Thursday, July 16 2009.

• I DON'T RECALL my mood the morning I was born, but I imagine I felt a bit out of sorts.