Spook by Mary Roach

For awhile now, Holly has had an interesting book out on her coffee table. She picked it up for spring break reading, and loved it. I admit at first I was drawn to it because it was shiny - there are two little reflective mirrors on the front. Then I flipped through a few of the chapters and went out and bought a copy for myself because it was so amusing and fascinating!

The book is called Spook, and it's written by Mary Roach. She's a freelance writer who writes hip and funny articles, and she came out with a book called Stiff, which was about the weird things that modern society uses corpses for... apparently more than just your run-of-the-average medical uses. Spook is billed as a scientific look at the afterlife. She's a skeptic, but she goes into a lot of fascinating situations with an open mind. She looks at both historical attempts to study to soul, the afterlife, etc.. and then looks around at what's going on today. She goes to India to visit a scientist who interviews poor rural children who are supposedly reincarnated.. she travels to England to take a "how to become a medium" class.. she learns about electromagnetic field testing, which is supposed to be a scientific explanation for hauntings.. and is horrifed at Cambridge University to discover what they hold in a small box in their archives (read to find its true disgustingness! It has to do with ectoplasm, and where it supposedly was secreted by female mediums in the early 1900s... I would NOT want to be the archivist who had to box this thing up!)

And so on an so forth. She has an engaging writing style - at once both hilarious and also very scientific and informative. And while she doesn't end with any earth-shattering conclusions, it's a heck of a fun journey along the way.

PS I am determined to use my genealogical detective skills to find out who Dr. Duncan Macdougall's "Patient 1" was who died in Dorchester's Cullis Consumptive Home in 1901. Macdougall was determined that the soul left the body upon death and had to have a weight.. upon Patient 1's death in the presence of several doctors and a precise scale, he lost 3/4 ounce.. known today by Hollywood as 21 grams, the supposed weight of the soul.