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Perhaps it's best to try defining this oddball book by what it is not. It is not a serious scientific study; it is not a piece of gallows humor; it is not a work with religious implications; it is not an exercise in debunking; it does not champion one consistent point of view. Yet it contains elements of all these approaches.
The publisher has not provided much information about Mary Roach's background, referring to her only as a "humor and science writer" and listing publications in which her work has appeared. That's not terribly helpful. Her one previous book, STIFF, explored ways in which human cadavers are used to improve the lot of those of us left behind. SPOOK takes us to the next obvious level: What about the lot of the dead themselves? Where are they? Can they communicate with us, or we with them? Do they even want to? With her characteristic breeziness, Roach asks the ultimate question: Is there a place in heaven where she can plug in her laptop?
Roach's approach may be summed up as amused to the point of flippancy. SPOOK reads like a 300-page Sunday supplement feature story. No opportunity for a crisp one-liner is ignored, no far-out theory or colorful character is too bizarre to be mentioned. A serious scientific tract it is not.
Consider the human soul. Is there such a thing? How much does it weigh? Can we see it? Where does it reside in the body? Does it exit us when we die --- and if so, from what body part and by what means? We meet in Roach's book people --- apparently utterly serious people --- who have gone to great lengths to try to answer such questions.
Then there is the matter of communicating with the dead, either directly or through mediums. Roach actually went to England and attended a weekend-long academic course for medium wannabes --- but her attendance was mainly for purposes of making the experience a chapter in her book, not because she had any serious mediumistic pretensions or even any talent in that direction. She also infiltrated a laboratory at the University of Virginia where there were ceiling cameras set up to try filming out-of-body experiences by dying people --- but again her purpose was literary/journalistic, not really scientific.
Roach's book brings before us a procession of odd characters who take these matters with quasi-scientific seriousness. Some of them are degreed and tenured academics, some are obvious frauds. None of them have any definitive answers that satisfy her. She calls herself "skeptical by nature," and invokes "evidence" and "plausibility" as her personal criteria for judging the claims of her subjects. She is suspicious alike of views based on ignorance and those based on "accepted dogma." Many of her scientific subjects are from the same breed of fence-sitters.
Her attitude toward most of the people she writes about, those still living as well as those long dead, may be summed up as an amused disbelief that keeps trying to veer off into open contempt. We read about a North Carolina court case in which the existence of a ghost was accepted as fact, about fake mediums who concealed yards of cheesecloth "ectoplasm" in their vaginas, and of people who have invented devices called the "psychic telephone" and the "effluviograph."
One of her findings, I must confess, did hit me with a purely personal immediacy. A few years ago, during a physical exam, my doctor informed me that my corpus callosum was missing. Reacting to my blank look, he explained that this is a membrane that binds the left and right brain hemispheres together. He put it in blunt but disquieting language: "Part of your brain is missing." That is not the sort of thing you want to hear from your doctor, believe me.
Now Mary Roach has disinterred a French surgeon named Gigot de la Peyronie who determined back in 1741 that the corpus callosum may well be the site of the human soul. No wonder people have been looking at me funny.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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