What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's thatthe 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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 09/17/2005
ISBN: 9780393059625
Pages: 311
Weight: 1.04lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.34w x 1.10d
Award: Macavity Award - Nominee

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2005 pg. 835
Publishers Weekly 08/22/2005 pg. 54
Library Journal 09/01/2005 pg. 174
Ingram Advance 10/01/2005 pg. 43
Booklist 09/01/2005 pg. 23
Newsweek 10/10/2005 pg. 63
New York Times 10/09/2005 pg. 9
Entertainment Weekly 10/21/2005 pg. 79
People Weekly 10/31/2005 pg. 56
Library Journal Prepub Alert 06/01/2005 pg. 102
Discover 03/01/2006 pg. 70
Booksense '76 October 2005 10/01/2005 pg. 1
Entertainment Weekly 04/18/2008 pg. 68
Entertainment Weekly 03/22/2013 pg. 67