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Read this Book! SPOOK!!!

kittynh

Penultimate Amazing
Joined
Dec 18, 2002
Messages
22,634
I have never reccomended a book before I have finished it. Well, that has changed. I"m reading the book "Spook" by Mary Roach. It's hilarious, but so very interesting...I'm only putting it down to tell everyone to go buy it or check it out at the library.

I loved her first book "STIFF" about dead bodies. "SPOOK" is subtitled "Science Tackles the Afterlife". She says she is not making up her mind if there is or isn't an afterlife, still she rather sides with the skeptics. Chapeters on ectoplasm...and her comments about WHAT WERE PEOPLE THINKING ANYONE CAN TELL IT'S FAKE...have you rolling. You know you've thought it. I wasn't sure I was going to like the chapter about the University of Arizona lab, and our old nemesis Gary Schwartz. But she doesn't buy much of what he is selling. Her chapter is far more likely to convince people about the truth of what is happening than an outright attack.

She even goes to Medium school in the UK. She pretty much has the same feelings and experience that any of the skeptics here would have. Not a good time.

Not since Will Cuppy has someone used footnotes in such a delightful way.

My favorite footnote so far is about a man involved with photographing the human soul leaving the body of a person at death....his name was Dr.Snook. He invented the Snook tube.

"To thoes who find humor in this poor man's name, I have this to say: His full name was Homer Clyde Snook."

It's a good educational read that will make you laugh.
 
Spook is DEFINITELY on my reading list, then. Thanks for the recommendation. I finished Stiff just before Christmas, and it was really great! There was so much humor in her writing - I was very impressed.

Some bits were very memorable. Especially the chapter on freeze-dried humans, becoming "mulch". And the class of heads for the plastic surgeons.

Only problem is, I have SO many books I just bought at TAM4, it's going to take me months to read them all.
 
Read it already (as well as Stiff). I kinda liked Stiff better. Spook seems incomplete. Unanswered questions near the end (I hope I don't spoil it for you).

Where exactly do we go when we die?

Charlie (Mary Roach Fan) Monoxide
 
Yeah, I have a feeling that she won't please anyone. NOt enough of the skeptic for the skeptic, and yet also not even woo for the believer.

Still, she does have fun investigating this stuff.
 
Doh! I passed on that one this weekend. Had been trying to find some good reading at the B&N in the Chicago suburb where I live, to no avail. Went back to Ohio to see the folk and stopped by the one there. Snagged "Why People Believe Weird Things", "Good & Evil of Science", "Demon Haunted World", "Cosmos" and one other. Passed on "Spook" 'cause I was already spending too much :( Now I'm a sad panda.
 
Read it already (as well as Stiff). I kinda liked Stiff better. Spook seems incomplete. Unanswered questions near the end (I hope I don't spoil it for you).

Where exactly do we go when we die?

Charlie (Mary Roach Fan) Monoxide


I haven't read Stiff. I hear it's better than Spook. It was a hilarious read, though. I like that Mary investigated the most cited sources for the pro and con side. I understand that she wouldn't commit at the end - it's something we can't know reasonably certain either way. As it stands, there is certainly no evidence for, but the ego in me would like to think I continue on. The realist in me says most likely not.
 
I haven't read Stiff. I hear it's better than Spook. It was a hilarious read, though. I like that Mary investigated the most cited sources for the pro and con side. I understand that she wouldn't commit at the end - it's something we can't know reasonably certain either way. As it stands, there is certainly no evidence for, but the ego in me would like to think I continue on. The realist in me says most likely not.
That's the "incomplete" I was alluding to. If Mary Roach could come up with some definite provable answers in Spook, we may have to look at changing some of the laws of physics.

Stiff deals mainly with the physical body and how we've treated and used dead bodies over the ages (ie medical research and crash test dummies). After reading it I'm somewhat inclined to allow medical research (I already allow for any organ harvesting) on my dead shell once I shuffle off this mortal coil ....

Charlie (use my dead butt as a bike stand) Monoxide
 
I think the last chapter sound tacted on. She comes across as quite a skeptic throughout the book, and I almost can hear her editors saying, "this book sounds like an atheist book!!!" and begging her to write a chapter at the end that will keep the Pope from banning it!

Her last sentence is something like "I believe in ghosts" which is so NOT what she wrote throughout the book. Plus, ghosts? Heck, a lot of people that believe in the afterlife dont' believe in ghosts! Ghost belief is quite a jump there!

So good book, weak ending!

And there were actually many examples that she missed, which I was looking for.

Still hilarious read, and I learned a lot. The whole weighing the body at death is going to come in handy as I get asked about that a bit.
 
Still hilarious read, and I learned a lot. The whole weighing the body at death is going to come in handy as I get asked about that a bit.

Me too. I've never looked into this claim before. It's amazing how much mileage a bad experiment done eighty years ago has gotten.
 

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