Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

1.5 stars - It wasn’t great/5 stars After reading and enjoying multiple books by Roach, I am finally tackling the few that I have not read. This topic is one that I was really interested in because while I am a skeptic, I also am really curious about people’s experiences with ghosts, spirits, and other spiritualism aspects. Unfortunately, this book was such a big disappointment and I would consider it the worst one she has written so far. To begin with Roach claims to be a skeptic and her goal is to explore this topic with an open mind, but she doesn’t succeed at all. She is constantly making fun or demeaning the people who believe and are also researching these different kinds of phenomena. It was very offputting from the beginning and I initially considered stopping, but wanted to see if it got better (it didn’t) and to see what topics are actually covered in this. It was just all around surprising and disappointing considering her other books. Another issue I had with this was job specific. She talks about the archives at Cambridge University and how they have the Society for Psychological Research’s papers. As an archivist myself, I didn’t like how she talked about this collection because she made fun of the university for collecting these papers, as she was using them herself in her research. These kinds of collections can be very important, even if you are not a believer, and it was just really disheartening to see a researcher and book writer demean an institution for collecting something of historical value. My third big issue was audiobook specific, and that is that the narrator did a terrible job. They do a fake Indian accent that sounded very racist (I am not Indian but this was how I felt when hearing it). Secondly, their character voices paired with Roach’s biased and judgemental writing made it seem like the narrator was leaning even heavier into making fun of these people. So all around, it felt like everyone was getting judged and made fun of because of their spiritualist beliefs. For me, I felt like I learned very little from this book because it was all pretty standard topics when talking about spiritualism or the afterlife: aura photography, ectoplasm, mediums, weighing a soul, etc. On top of that, with her constant negativity towards believers and testing, it made it hard to actually focus on what the scientific test was being done. I don’t feel I can trust she has accurately described these tests because of her bias and judgement coming through, so I feel like I learned little I trust. So overall, I suggest skipping this one.

Mary Roach has already tackled sex and corpses, now she tackles the afterlife. Spook was actually pretty good in Roach's typical fun but scientific way.

Roach explores reincarnation, whether a soul exists (is it the big toe? or the sperm?), how much a soul weighs (surprisingly a lot of tests to determine this), ectoplasm, mediums, etc. She actually got to speak with Allison Du Bois, who is the basis of the TV series Medium.

I still don't believe quite a bit, and neither did Roach, but I do know that sometimes faith and belief is not based on fact or anything provable. It just is.

The thing I really enjoy about Mary Roach books is that they are a deeper look into topics from different aspects of the subject. From the proof of reincarnation, to the tangible evidence of a soul, to the education of mediums, the author opens up to all possibilities of the afterlife from an unbiased opinion.